
Class _jE_££L£ 



Book 



Copyright N° 



COI'YKIGIIT DEPOSIT. 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

AS AN UNDERGRADUATE & & & 

BY DONALD WILHELM j& j& j& j& ,& j& 




BOSTON JOHN W. LUCE 
AND COMPANY, MCMX 



Copyright, 1910, 

by L. E. Bassett 

Boston, Mass., U. S. A. 



•CI.A268974 



Respectfully Dedicated 

to 

ALBERT BUSHNELL HART, 

A Classmate of 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT. 



FOREWORD. 



I take this opportunity to express my 
gratitude to Mr. Roosevelt for the privilege 
of reprinting such of his essays and other 
compositions as appear in this book. Al- 
though he has not read my manuscript, several 
of his college associates and classmates have 
done so, and to them, to the editors of the 
Harvard "Graduates' Magazine," "Crimson," 
and "Advocate," and to all the other Har- 
vard men who have assisted mo, I express my 
thanks. The hearty interest they have shown 
in the vigorous little man who trod their 
path for a time, has been the most pleasing 
consideration in following him from the gate- 
way to undergraduate life down the bright 
lane to the portal of the bigger world. 

DONALD WILHELM. 



CHAPTER I 



ARRIVAL AT HARVARD COLLEGE. 



AN AUTUMN wind rouses and swirls 
the dust of the unpaved triangle 
called Harvard Square ; on two sides of 
it standing close to one another are stores, 
on the remaining and longest side a three 
rail wooden fence circles a group of quiet 
buildings nestled among the elms. The 
tinkling bell of an approaching horse car 
is heard and soon the car itself bumps its way 
around the curve from the direction of Boston. 
A thin-chested, nervous, spectacled little fel- 
low swings himself from the rear platform, 
stands for a moment in the eddying dust, then 
turns about, passes through an opening in the 
low fence, thence between two of th old build- 
ings and finds himself in a rect gle over- 
arched with entwining boughs and bounded by 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

dignified college buildings. To one of these 
squarely in the middle of the side opposite to 
him lead all the gravel paths, and to it ad- 
vances our young freshman. 

Three years before at a family luncheon a 
guest had noticed near one end of the table 
this same lad, with his spectacles and a mouth 
like a band of blued steel. Round his plate 
were scattered dead butterflies and beetles, 
which he studied while he ate, as if alone by 
a camp fire in some deep forest. Such power 
of concentration in a boy the guest had never 
seen. She inquired who that odd little fellow 
might be, and was told in a voice that seemed 
softened by respect, "Little Theodore Roose- 
velt, the brightest lad of all the family." 

For generations strong ancestors had been 
shaping the character of this boy as in the 
years long before they had struggled in the 
dykes of Holland and fought among the crags 
of Scotland. His father, Theodore Roosevelt, 
a bearded man of Dutch descent had married 
Martha Bulloch of Georgia, a beautiful woman 
of the languorous southern type. 

When this son Theodore was born the tense 
spirit of war was already in the air and two 
years later the guns at Sumter were to crash. 



ARRIVAL AT HARVARD COLLEGE 

With wealth and influence his father supported 
the national government with all his might; 
his mother sympathized with her two brothers, 
one serving the Confederacy abroad, the other 
destined to give the command that made the 
last gun flicker at the approaching Kearsarge 
from the battered side of the Alabama. From 
his father the child inherited an intense ad- 
miration for manliness, his homely vigor of 
mind and of body; from his mother a warm- 
hearted, impulsive sincerity. 

Now, a lad of eighteen, he was trudging out 
from the shelter of home and kin into the 
realm of strange faces and new surroundings. 
Up the stone steps of the administrative build- 
ing he climbed to an unpretentious college 
room and there leaned low over a desk so that 
he could see as he registered his name in large 
boyish writing. Into the room his classmates, 
over two hundred of them, came, or chatted 
in groups in the hall. One would not have 
chosen him to excel in anything. Most of 
them were physically stronger than he — in 
eyesight, muscle, and endurance. Some had 
commanding personalities and the golden gift 
of making friends. Some had noteworthy an- 
cestors. One, taller and stroriger than he, was 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

to batter him in a boxing match, and years 
later cross his path like a defiant ship out of 
the night, and disappear; another, whose elec- 
tion to the captaincy of the freshman crew 
he opposed, was to serve him in a high office 
of the nation; another, under whom he was to 
serve on the editorial board of the "Harvard 
Advocate," was to edit a history of the nation. 
All looked out on a college of equal oppor- 
tunities. Compared with the Harvard of to- 
day, it was a small college content in its tradi- 
tions and its neighborly solidarity; there were 
only eight hundred students, now there are 
twenty-three hundred. The social center of 
this little community, where all but few of 
the undergraduates lived, was the college Yard, 
the quadrangle with its covering of elms. 
There was no "Union" with its newspapers 
and easy chairs, no pretentious clubs and but 
one private dormitory. In the spring under 
the trees in the Yard the undergraduates lolled 
on pillows tossed from nearby rooms, and in 
classes — for the elective system was just com- 
ing into effect, — round firesides, and in ath- 
letics, they mingled so frequently that many 
men knew all their classmates. They formed 
a cordon of on-lookers, the only fence, while 

4 



ARRIVAL AT HARVARD COLLEGE 

watching the bright-clad athletes on Jarvis 
Field. They applauded contestants in the old 
gymnasium, now but an alcove in a gigantic 
system of museums, or fought for the honor 
of their class. On these contests the under- 
graduate publications — the "Crimson, the 
"Advocate," and the "Lampoon," just coming 
into existence-— commented with the intimate 
spirit of village weekly papers ; indeed, to this 
neighborly feeling many of the instructors 
and all of the undergraduates contributed; 
the graduate departments were not prominent, 
there were few men on the outskirts of real 
college life. In spirit, then, in housing and in 
government the busy center of learning of to- 
day is as different from the little village of 
thirty years ago as the tripling of numbers 
naturally makes it. 

In this little community every element of 
Roosevelt's personality was to get new 
strength. In a different college, one may say, 
he would have developed differently; another 
may say there never was a man so fixed in his 
own course in life, but it is reasonably sure 
that not the least element in his development 
was the influence of the great wealth of per- 
sonality Harvard College was then harboring 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

in its faculty and in the great men who met in 
its shades. As a disputatious youth who ar- 
gued with his instructors in class, who sought 
out their friendship, and who mingled with 
great men in club house and in chapter room, 
Roosevelt must have felt their influence and 
known their example. His college friends 
agree that never have they known a man who 
has retained the characteristics of his youth 
so faithfully as Roosevelt has retained them. 
His undergraduate life, down to its smallest 
details, prefigured the Roosevelt of today. 






CHAPTER II 



HIS VARIETY OF INTERESTS. 



ROOSEVELT was one of those rare 
men who can stand apart and survey 
their own lives and comprehend their 
own needs. He was not content to tramp 
along with other undergraduates, to learn 
merely what they learned, but he must desert 
into new paths and master the smallest de- 
tails of his way. He has confessed that one 
reason why he has succeeded is because he 
has consciously put himself in the way of 
learning new things and of getting new ex- 
perience. His unflagging spirit of inquiry, his 
precocious desire to participate in national 
politics and to have a voice in whatever took 
place about him, was the characteristic of an 
unusual youth ; although there have been some 
undergraduates at Harvard more popular, there 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

have been few whose social and practical in- 
terests were so judiciously apportioned. 

Only in his freshman year did he hold him- 
self aloof from activities outside the pale of 
his college work. He was one of eight young 
men, all destined for prominence in college 
and in after life, who, at the opening of college 
went apart from the other students at Memor- 
ial Hall to organize a dining club in a house 
a short distance from the Yard, first at Mrs. 
Morgan's on Brattle street, and for the last 
three years, at Mrs. Wilson's on Mt. Auburn 
street. Here, round an unpretentious table, in 
a bare little room, he was to cherish contented- 
ly seven of his most intimate friends. He never 
dined regularly at Memorial Hall. He was 
not elected a member of the Kappa Nu, the 
only freshman society, nor was he an officer 
in his freshman class. Only once does he 
stand out in its activities; then, in a meeting 
called to elect a new captain of the freshman 
crew, Robert Bacon, he climbed on a chair and 
in his first stump speech quoted Lincoln's 
time worn but sound aphorism "that it is 
not best to swap horses when crossing a 
stream." 

The "society fever" at Harvard was not as 

8 



HIS VARIETY OF INTEREST 

fervent as at many colleges. The clubs had 
no conspicuous badges, nor costly structures 
with lofty windows and iron-barred doors. 
The members were happy with simple insignia 
hung in their rooms and capacious quarters 
where good fellowship might rule. The walls 
of a club typical of those to which Roosevelt 
belonged were adorned with engravings and 
paintings of historic and classic worth. In 
one corner stood a piano invitingly open with 
a varied collection of books shelved nearby; 
hung in a little alcove waiting to be used were 
foils and fencing masks, boxing gloves and 
rifles, and a roomy stage for the presentation 
of student theatricals filled one end of the 
room. 

After the election of new members the club 
marched to the middle of the Yard and there, 
round a leader, they spelled in unison the 
names of the chosen men. Time after time 
Roosevelt's name was sent floating up among 
the elms, and roommates, sitting upright in bed, 
scrambled to the open window, and, when the 
last cheer had died away into the night, often 
fell to talking about this slender little man. 
Visitors to Roosevelt's rooms in a house at 
1 6 Winthrop street, where he lived alone dur- 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

ing his entire college course, found scattered 
among college pennants, hunting trophies, and 
pictures of trap and chase the insignia of a 
dozen organizations, from the bronze plate of 
a rowing club to the ribbons of the Hasty 
Pudding. 

The Hasty Pudding Club was one of the 
most prized of those devoted primarily to 
good fellowship. 

To this were usually graduated in their sen- 
ior year the members of the Institute of 1770, 
the oldest of the societies at Harvard. Roose- 
velt was among the first fifteen from his class 
to be chosen for the Institute, the fifth to be 
chosen for the Pudding and later its treasurer. 
He was, moreover, a member of the Porcel- 
lian, a discriminating and expensive organiza- 
tion, of the Alpha Delta Phi, and an honorary 
member of the Glee Club. There were other 
purely social organizations at Harvard quite 
as prominent, but, in a general sense, when he 
entered the life of one he entered the life of 
all. 

Another evidence that at the end of four 
years of college he was one of the most popu- 
lar men in his class is that he was one of six 
men nominated by his class for second mar- 

10 



HIS VARIETY OF INTEREST 

shal and though failing of an election to 
that position was chosen a member of the 
Class Day Committee, and an efficient member 
he proved to be. "At about quarter to seven," 
the Crimson said, the senior class was called 
to order and "nominations were made for chair- 
man of the Class Day Committee. After sev- 
eral nominations and withdrawals, Messrs. 
Woodbury and Morgan were left, and Mr. 
Woodbury was elected. The election was 
made unanimous. The leading candidates for 
the second place on this committee were 
Messrs. Bement and Roosevelt. Mr. Roosevelt 
was elected." 

In recognition of excellent scholarship 
Roosevelt was chosen in his senior year a 
member of the honorary society of Phi Beta 
Kappa. Oliver Wendell Holmes presided over 
the Harvard Chapter and Rev. Edward Everett 
Hale and Rev. Phillips Brooks often attended 
its meetings. These men were also members 
of the Alpha Delta Phi, and Roosevelt met 
them repeatedly. He also met the historians, 
George Bancroft and Charles Francis Adams 
and the poet, James Russell Lowell, then a 
professor in the college, and innumerable other 
eminent men who were graduate members of 

ii 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

the Hasty Pudding Club and returned for its 
annual celebrations each year, doubtless to 
mingle with the undergraduates as their 
guests. 

This association with men of distinction is 
perhaps one of the best yet least-reckoned bene- 
fits of such social organizations as those 
Roosevelt belonged to. He had every oppor- 
tunity to estimate his own capabilities, not 
only by personal acquaintance with them but 
by intimate stories told at club dinners and in 
the confiding air of the chapter room of great 
men gone before. 

From such social organizations Roosevelt 
knew he derived immense good, but there were 
others wholly different from which he might 
also profit. Of such was the Rifle Club. In 
competitions held on the grounds of the Wa- 
tertown Arsenal Roosevelt was never success- 
ful nevertheless he learned substantially all 
that was necessary, and when the Spanish War 
broke out he could take his place at the head 
of his Rough Riders confident that he could 
use a rifle efficiently if he was called upon to 
do so. 

He joined the Art Club, over which Profes- 
sor Charles Eliot Norton presided, and was 

12 



HIS VARIETY OF INTEREST 

soon a member of the Natural History Society, 
flourishing under the presidency of that re- 
markable man, Professor Nathaniel Southgate 
Shaler. In the absence of Professor Shaler, 
Roosevelt himself presided, for he was elected 
undergraduate vice-president in his junior year. 
As a boy he was intensely interested in natural 
history and his constant enthusiasm was one 
of the causes of Professor Shaler showing such 
a distinct fondness for him. When the great 
teacher was told how a bag of lobsters which 
Roosevelt was bringing from the Boston 
wharves for dissection escaped confinement 
and went crawling in all directions over the 
floor of a crowded street car, he laughingly 
slapped his thigh and told the story over time 
and again at a meeting of the faculty the fol- 
lowing day. 

Professor Shaler also heard how, late on a 
rainy night four students who lived in the 
same house with Roosevelt heard the frantic 
neighs of a horse in a neighboring barn. They 
called to one another through the dark, donned 
their clothes and gingerly went forth to ex- 
plore. In the barn feverishly striving to ex- 
tricate the horse's leg from a hole in the side 



13 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

of the stall, they found Roosevelt, half- 
clothed, hatless, even without his spectacles. 

About a year before Roosevelt was elected 
vice-president of the Natural History Society, 
the Crimson said that the "Society have on 
foot a project to utilize the valuable dredging 
apparatus in the possession of the University. 
The proposed plan is, sometime during the 
spring to hire a steam tug, and, during a two 
days' cruise in Massachusetts Bay, to gain a 
practical knowledge of sea dredging." This 
project was never accomplished. What in- 
fluence it had on Roosevelt's election can only 
be conjectured but it is safe to presume that he 
was not indifferent to any such plan. 

In his junior year Roosevelt organized, we 
are told, a club which is recalled by its mem- 
bers as one of the bright spots in their under- 
graduate life. This was the Finance Club. 
It was founded as the outgrowth of interest 
in a course given by Professor Dunbar on the 
financial history of the United States, to make 
a study of the currency systems of other na- 
tions, particularly of England. For a time 
Roosevelt presided and the extraordinary 
swath the club cut in the field of undergrad- 
uate activities was in great measure due to his 



HIS VARIETY OF INTEREST 

energy. The Advocate, in editorials of differ- 
ent date repeatedly praised the organization: 

"The Finance Club enters the field for the 
first time," it said. "One lecture which proved 
both instructing and instructive has already 
been given under its auspices. Two more are 
to follow; the first, by Professor Sumner of 
Yale on 'The Relation of Legislation to 
Money;' and the second by Professor Walker 
of Yale on 'The Principles of Taxation.' "... 

"The enterprise of the Finance Club met with 
deserved success in the lecture of Professor 
Sumner . . . The Theatre was well filled, a 
larger body of students beirig present than 
we have seen on such an occasion in Sanders 
for years." . . . 

"The club is to be congratulated on the suc- 
cess of its efforts to excite interest in domestic 
subjects. Organized only in December it has 
already had five papers read before it by mem- 
bers and has given four public lectures." . . . 

A year later: 

"The enterprise of the Finance Club remains 

15 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

unabated. Already its members are arranging 
for a course of lectures for next year. They 
have secured such eminent lecturers as Gen- 
eral Garfield and Abram S. Hewitt, and are in 
correspondence with Secretary Schurz." 

Another club the results from which were 
to be quite as useful to Roosevelt in future 
life was named the "O. K.," a paper on the 
meaning of its name being read by each candi- 
date at the initiation supper. 

In it a discussion of the authorship of the 
"Letters of Junius" occupied three of the 
monthly meetings. When Roosevelt's turn 
came to read a paper, his subject was "The 
Machine of Politics." The tenor of the club 
is typified by these subjects, all of literary 
or of political significance. 

Just before the Presidential election of 1880 
intense party feeling was aroused among the 
students and an informal vote, was suggested, 
probably by Roosevelt, as he was put in 
charge of the polls. The candidates voted for 
were Grant, Sherman, Blaine, Bayard and 
others of less importance. His classmates 
say that Roosevelt voted for Senator Bayard, 

16 



HIS VARIETY OF INTEREST 

a democrat. Only four years later, after two 
years of brilliant effort in the New York Leg- 
islature, he was forced to arrive at a decision 
bound to affect his whole future. On one side 
he found the Democratic party, with George 
William Curtis, Secretary Schurz, and most of 
the men on whom he put strongest reliance, 
on the other side a Republican party appar- 
ently on the wane. As quick of decision as 
Roosevelt is it took him several weeks of de- 
liberation on his western ranch before he de- 
cided to publish a statement affirming his al- 
legience to the party that was to make him 
President. 

From the editorials in the Advocate it ap- 
pears that Roosevelt was at the head of this 
student movement to choose a President, and, 
though the Republicans outnumbered the 
Democrats, to show "that intelligent and con- 
servative men will not allow party affiliation 
to rule their better judgement and force them 
to support an unfit or corrupt candidate" or 
one seeking a third term. In its appeal to stu- 
dents to vote the paper said that "No doubt 
there are some who think taking an informal 
vote for President is a departure from the 
sphere of the student to that of the politician 

17 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

and others who regard it as only time thrown 
away ... It should not be forgotten that a 
representative government is such only so 
long as the whole people are represented, the 
intelligent and good, as well as the ignorant 
and bad, and that, as a small force is not 
infrequently big in result, the indication of 
the choice of the University in this matter may 
be effective in securing the nomination of some 
man who is a type of the best American citi- 
zen. The gentleman in charge of the polls is 
a proof that the movement is not one of idle 
curiosity, but of earnest purpose." The vote 
for Bayard was 233, Grant 146, Sherman 139; 
at Yale it was Grant 213, Sherman 205, Bay- 
ard 82. 

The last sentence in the editorial of the 
Advocate is a singular tribute to an under- 
graduate by a college paper, without a parallel 
in any of the college publications during the 
four years Roosevelt was an undergraduate. 
It shows as nothing else could that he was rec- 
ognized as a leader of undergraduate opinion. 

The evening the informal vote was an- 
nounced this future President might have been 
seen setting out for Boston with a torch on 
his shoulder and the dusty road underfoot, in 

18 



HIS VARIETY OF INTEREST 

the van of the torchlight parade. It was going 
along noisily but peaceably through a street 
in Cambridge when down from a second-story 
window was bawled: "Hush up, you blooming 
freshmen!". "Every student there," relates 
Professor Hart, "was profoundly indignant. I 
noticed one little man, small but firmly knit. 
He had slammed his torch to the street. His 
fists quivered like steel springs and swished 
through the air as if plunging a hole through 
a mattress. I had never seen a man so angry 
before. 'It's Roosevelt from New York,' some 
one said. I made an effort to know Roosevelt 
better from that moment." 

Roosevelt was the only member of the Dutch 
Reformed Church in the College ; in fact his 
name appears opposite membership in that 
church after a long series of ciphers for pre- 
ceding classes. He was liberal-minded never- 
theless, and his very liberalism caused him as 
an undergraduate to be thrust into the lime- 
light of the college community at Cambrid'ge 
quite as prominently as he was in later years 
at Rome. 

At the beginning of his senior year he was 
engaged to teach the Sunday School at Christ 
Church, the oldest edifice in Cambridge, 

19 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

"Here divine service was held December 31, 
1775, General and Mrs. Washington being pres- 
ent." Here for several weeks the energetic 
young teacher turned up re'gularly every Sun- 
day afternoon to teach young people religious 
tenets as he conceived them. 

One day the report spread that he had been 
summarily removed by the new rector, Doctor 
James Field Spaulding. "The news spread 
about college like flames through a building," 
relates one of Roosevelt's classmates. "We 
learned Roosevelt had been removed because 
he was not a confirmed member of the Epis- 
copalian church. Everybody lauded Roose- 
velt. The instructor in one of our courses said 
something about religious toleration by neigh- 
boring ministers, and the students cheered. 
One professor actually withdrew from the con- 
gregation. But Roosevelt did not take the oc- 
currence to heart. The next three Sundays 
he tau'ght at the Church of the Ascension in 
East Cambridge and then continued in a 
church in Chestnut Hill, the home of Miss Lee, 
to whom he was engaged." 

Not long after Roosevelt's adventure in 
teaching Sunday school, one evening he at- 
tended the Boston Theatre. After one of the 

20 



HIS VARIETY OF INTEREST 

acts a group of undergraduates gave a cheer 
for Harvard. The ushers remonstrated, for 
trouble with students had been experienced 
before, and Roosevelt hurried across the lobby 
and remonstrated with the ushers, so stren- 
uously that he, with the real offenders, was 
made to leave the theatre. The Boston papers 
made space of the occurence. Professor Dun- 
bar and Professor Shaler found the accounts 
so unfair that both published protests. The 
Boston Herald designated that of Professor 
Shaler in the Atlantic Monthly as a "turgid 
stream of rhetoric," and the college papers 
then directed their editorial comment at the 
Herald. 

Roosevelt was often the victim of caprice 
that knew not the regulator, self conscious- 
ness. He was not an ascetic, yet, "he was, 
next to my own father," a classmate wrote 
to Jacob A. Riis, "the purest-minded man I ever 
knew." There is no evidence that he ever 
smoked, and, what is more significant, no evi- 
dence that he ever tried to. Even that stern 
old woodsman, William W. Sewall, with 
whom Roosevelt spent his summers in the 
Maine forests, comes out of his reticence to 
write that he never met a man with such ab- 

21 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

solute ideas of right and wrong, such re- 
markable strength on the one hand, such lov- 
able sympathy on the other. 

With care not to exaggerate it may be con- 
jectured that in the history of Harvard College 
there have been few undergraduates with an 
array of interests more varied and more judi- 
ciously apportioned than Roosevelt's. He 
delved into social and intellectual life so en- 
thusiastically that he held important offices in 
five organizations and belonged to six others, 
he advocated political policies, discussed art 
and natural history, heard optional lectures on 
literature, and besides teaching Sunday School, 
hunting in the Maine woods, yachtin'g on Long 
Island Sound, assisting to edit a college paper, 
beginning a book, and manifesting an intense 
interest in athletics, he maintained high col- 
lege rank, in recognition of which he was 
elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While other men 
followed the beaten track he deserted to the 
farthest reaches of undergraduate life. The 
leader of college opinion was fitting himself 
as a leader of opinion in his country. 



22 



CHAPTER III. 



HIS STUDIES. 



THE accurate determination of any man's 
college rank is usually of small 
importance, especially after thirty 
years have intervened since his gradu- 
ation and his worth has long since been 
tested to sterner standards than those 
of the rank-list; but no one will deny 
legitimate curiosity, perhaps even, of scientific 
interest. 

Probably no one is less curious about his 
college marks than Mr. Roosevelt ; perhaps he 
never knew or has quite forgotten his exact 
rank, but if he has not forgotten, doubtless he 
relishes a "certain piquant pleasure" at the 
visible disproportion between his college rank 
and his success in after life, for his rank in a 
class of one hundred and sixty-one was but 

2& 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

twenty-first, the same as Grant's at West 
Point, about the same as that of Emerson and 
of Holmes at Harvard. 

There is a difference, as Baoon points out, 
between excellence and excelling. Roosevelt 
went to Harvard for an education, he did not 
go to compete for marks. Had he done so 
he would have taken before graduation an ex- 
amination for final honors in natural history, 
a special mark of distinction he could have 
easily won. "No man ever came to Harvard 
more serious in his purpose to secure first of 
all an education," his intimate friend, Ex- 
Governor Curtis Guild, Jr., says, "he was for- 
ever at it, and probably no man of his time 
read more extensively or deeply, especially in 
directions that did not count on the honor-list 
or marking-sheet. He had the happy power 
of abstraction, and nothing was more common 
than a noisy roomful of college mates with 
Roosevelt frowning with intense absorption 
over a book in the corner. He did not read for 
examinations but for information." 

Of academic distinctions he won but few. He 
did not win a prize for reading, nor for English 
composition; the center-table in his room was 
not adorned with a "Detur," a book given as 

24 



HIS STUDIES 

a special mark of merit; he won neither sec- 
ond-year nor final honors in a single subject, 
and he did not deliver the "dissertation" to 
which he was entitled at Commencement. The 
only honorable mention set down in his degree 
was in natural history. His political antithesis, 
Josiah Quincy, who shone brightly as an un- 
dergraduate, received two prizes for reading, 
one for speaking, one for English composition, 
a "Detur," and besides being a prolific and able 
contributor to the college papers, received in 
his degree honorable mention in Greek, Latin, 
English composition, and political economy, 
and delivered a dissertation at Commencement. 
When Roosevelt was at Harvard, as to a les- 
ser extent now, a student had to take certain 
prescribed courses in fundamental subjects. 
In the freshman year all his courses were pre- 
scribed although a freshman could enter ad- 
vanced sections of certain courses if he had 
shown unusual efficiency in his entrance ex- 
aminations; in the sophomore year and in the 
junior year about one-third of the work was 
prescribed, in the senior year only a few for- 
ensic themes. In addition to these prescribed 
courses each sophomore was required to 
choose from a list of elective studies courses 

35 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

amounting to ten exercises a week, each junior 
and senior courses amounting to twelve exer- 
cises a week. 

These elective courses were intended to give 
a student considerable freedom to follow nat- 
ural "bent," and those selected by Roosevelt 
reflect clearly his inclinations as an under- 
graduate. Viewed as a whole, the courses he 
chose were essentially "practical," as distin- 
guished from "literary" or "esthetic." In his 
college work as in his morals he stood with his 
feet firmly planted on mother earth. He knew 
the keen value of mathematics and of science, 
he felt the absolute need of modern languages. 
Each year his love and appreciation of these 
studies grew and at the end the plan of his 
college work was a well-moulded and con- 
sistent one. 

Just one-half of Roosevelt's total elective 
work was devoted to natural history, almost 
a third to modern languages, but not a single 
hour did he give to Latin or Greek, not a sin- 
gle hour to English composition or history. 
Grant, leader of the "largest civilized armies 
the world ever saw," at West Point read nov- 
els and almost failed to pass in the study of 
army tactics; Webster, scholar, logician, dis- 

3$ 



HIS STUDIES 

liked Greek and hated mathematics; Emerson, 
philosopher, fared not too well in philosophy; 
and now Roosevelt — historian, journalist, lover 
of the classics, is found in the ranks of the 
anomalies. He took no more history, no more 
literature, no more classics than was required, 
and moreover, in the single Latin and Greek 
courses that were required he failed to get a 
grade of seventy percent. Indeed, even before 
he entered college he did not affect the classics, 
for he chose the set of entrance examinations 
that demanded the minimum of the classics 
and the maximum of mathematics, and passed 
the examination in mathematics with so high 
a mark that he was admitted with a very few 
others to the advanced freshman course. Yet 
Mr. Jacob A. Riis, one of Roosevelt's most 
intimate biographers, surmises, "I have a no- 
tion that he did not like arithmetic. I feel 
it in my bones, somehow." Who, indeed, 
would have conceived such a reversal in a 
man's aptitudes? Who will now say that as 
the boy is so will be the man, or, that as the 
man is so was the boy? 

Mr. Riis' inference suggests another that 
he, Professor Hu'go Munsterberg and other 
writers have made, that Roosevelt, who has 

27 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

written, as well as made, so much history, 
must have delighted in the study of English 
composition and of history when an under- 
graduate. Yet he took only the prescribed 
courses in those subjects. 

He took but a single course in history, that, 
in his sophomore year, a not very comprehen- 
sive one requiring attendance at two lectures 
a week during one-half the college year. His 
required work in English composition was 
more comprehensive, however, extending 
through the first half of his sophomore year 
and through his junior year and demanding 
four forensic themes in his senior year. In 
these courses Mr. Roosevelt did not succeed 
too well, yet, Mr. Guild says that "in writing, 
Roosevelt's ability was thoroughly understood 
but very little displayed," and his election as 
an editor of the "Advocate" was a recognition 
of his ability to write. The courses in com- 
position required the writing of sophomore 
themes, junior themes, junior forensics, and 
senior forensics. In junior themes he obtained 
a fair place on the rank-list, but in the other 
courses his name is missing, that is, he did not 
get a grade of seventy per cent.; and in one 
of these other courses, senior forensics, he was 

28 



HIS STUDIES 

one of the very few men whose efforts failed to 
be discerned by Professor Andrew Peabody, 
"that much-loved professor whose very fail- 
ings leaned to the rank-list side." Mr. Roose- 
velt, like most writers, is not proud of hia 
college themes and says he would rather they 
were not brought into the light, but his con- 
tributions to the college papers are discussed 
in another chapter. 

There was a reason, and a just one, why 
Roosevelt neglected his senior forensics. His 
friends told him he could write well, and now 
the full-ripe plan of his first book dangled be- 
fore his eyes ready to be plucked and shaped 
by his eager hand. Who would not choose the 
writing of a book to the writing of college 
themes? And who cannot picture the impa- 
tient Roosevelt fretting within the limits of 
theme paper and fifteen hundred words? Who 
cannot see him trying to tear himself away 
to fields of larger endeavor and greater deed? 

As for his rank in other studies — in his 
single history course, as in most of his pre- 
scribed courses, that is, in rhetoric, logic, and 
psychology, Roosevelt's marks were high. In 
all of his elective courses, except one in French 
given once a week, his name is found, on the 

29 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

rank-list well toward the top ; in eight of these 
elective courses his mark is eighty-nine per 
cent, or over, and in one of them, a popular 
but not easy course in political economy, his 
name is first upon the printed rank-list. In 
his advanced courses in political economy, 
involving the study of Cairnes, McLeod, and 
Bastiat, his marks were commendable. Of his 
German courses, one was "historic prose" 
and the other two were devoted to composition 
and oral exercises. His courses in Italian re- 
quired a great amount of reading and ap- 
proached more nearly to pure literature than 
any of his chosen studies. 

The term "natural history" comprehended 
more thirty years ago than now. Roosevelt's 
courses in that subject, in which he received 
honorable mention in his degree, included com- 
parative anatomy and physiology of ver- 
tebrates, elementary botany, physical geogra- 
phy and meteorology, geology, and elementary 
and advanced zoology. In all these subjects 
he succeded in getting marks so high that he 
could easily have won final honors, which are 
prized far more highly than honorable men- 
tion, by taking extra examinations; but have- 
ing got substantially all he could from his 

30 



HIS STUDIES 

college course he cared little for the laurel — 
he went to college, we have seen, not for fine 
marks but for an education. 

Roosevelt was a disputatious youth whose 
presence in class was always felt. In his fresh- 
man year he disturbed a class when the in- 
structor, calling the roll for the first time, 
addressed him as "Ruse-felt." The spectacled 
little man was instantly on his feet insisting 
very earnestly that he was of Dutch descent 
and his name should be pronounced "Rose- 
velt." A thousand times since that day he has 
heard people mispronounce his name and if one 
listens to one's neighbor one concludes that 
half the nation go on saying "Ruse-felt" or 
"Rus-e-velt" for "Rose-velt." 

Roosevelt's classmates remember a slender 
nervous young man with side-whiskers, eye- 
glasses, and bright red cheeks red-hued from 
a bright necktie, who climbed with them in 
the freshman year to a small recitation room 
on the top floor of University Hall. "We 
were having problems from Todhunter's Plane 
Trigonometry," one of them writes, "and they 
were more difficult than any given before. In 
those years if the instructor did not arrive be- 
fore five minutes past the hour at which the 

3i 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

lecture was to commence we were allowed a 
'cut.' This day we looked into the room, 
compared our watches and lingered in the 
hall until the time was up. Then we romped 
down stairs; that is, most of us did; but there 
was one youth who was there for business. 
He went into the room, looked at the black- 
board just at the right of the door and found 
it covered with trigonometric formulae. One 
after another he read, following the blackboard 
round the room, and when he had almost 
reached the end he all but bumped into the 
engrossed instructor writing away behind the 
open door. We were sauntering across the 
Yard when we heard Roosevelt shout from the 
steps. 'Come on back fellows. He's behind 
the door.'" 

The students in sophomore rhetoric remem- 
ber that Roosevelt was the first to question 
the instructor, that thin-voiced, sandy-haired, 
blue-eyed man, that famous rhetorician, Adams 
Sherman Hill. Most of the class, one of its 
members said, were quite satisfied to take what 
was given them, but "Roosevelt was always 
asking questions, always pinning the instruc- 
tor down to hairbreadth points." Professor 
Hill grew tired, as professors in their dignity 

32 



HIS STUDIES 

do, of having this over-zealous censor wait on 
his remarks, and looked about for a gentle way 
to silence him; perhaps he learned it in con- 
versation with other instructors about Roose- 
velt, perhaps he divined it one bright day when 
he was reading to the class a theme as an ex- 
ample of precocious sentimentality. For sud- 
denly, so one of the students says, he paused 
and looked thoughtfully at Roosevelt ; then he 
asked him to criticise the theme. The censor 
for once lacked his usual assertiveness, and 
Professor Hill seemed encouraged. A second 
later he glanced up and asked Roosevelt to 
state specifically what he thought of under- 
graduates prematurely falling in love. Roose- 
velt stammered and was quiet, and the class 
laughed cruelly and long, and soon all the col- 
lege knew, when they turned and saw him 
blushing as furiously as a girl. 

Roosevelt always took his inclination to 
question and to investigate with him ; he never 
got through investigating and being investi- 
gated, he wrote to the secretary of his class 
years later when Civil Service Commissioner. 
One such man in a community is often dis- 
concerting, but two seek one another out like 
giants of the woods. They always respect 

33 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

one another and they are always happy to- 
gether, just as they would be if turned adrift 
on a flood or left in the middle of the Sahara. 

The two score of undergraduates in Geol- 
ogy IV, a course conducted by Professor Sha- 
ler, still remember a scene in a small low-ceiled 
classroom at Harvard thirty years ago. That 
tall, light-haired man, with his bright eyes 
gleaming out of a bushy beard, moved about 
with his startling activity on a small platform. 
He talked and illustrated, now facing a chart, 
now facing the students gathered in a semi- 
circle at long uncomfortable red plank desks. 
They felt that the little room had an air of 
home-like informality, that the impromptu 
words of the master were falling like the pleas- 
ant discourse of a father to his son. He made 
them feel free to show their interest by asking 
questions, but they felt that questions bothered 
him, trying as he was to review a large field 
of knowledge in a short time; they felt, in 
fact, that questions had been showering too 
rapidly upon him — that over-live Roosevelt 
with his abounding curiosity asked most of 
them. 

They had just settled on the hard benches 
and the lecture was hardly under way. Pro- 

34 



HIS STUDIES 

fessor Shaler was facing a chart, pointer in 
hand, talking. In a few moments they were 
sitting erect, marvelling at a point as it was 
driven skilfully to the close of a perfect rhetor- 
ical climax. Then a disharmonizing, vehement 
question broke in and anticipated the conclu- 
sion. 

Again they were sitting erect, following 
with eager interest a long periodic sentence 
rolling melodiously from the lips of the mas- 
ter. Again a question in that same vehement 
voice interposed, and again the master an- 
swered. . He turned back to the chart : 

"As I was saying, gentlemen, when Mr. 
Roosevelt asked his second question." And 
those who were near Roosevelt saw his bright 
eyes twinkle. Then, sharp as two taps of the 
pointer on the chart, they heard two questions 
pop into the expectant air. The gray-bearded 
teacher whirled about and a storm was in his 
bright eyes. 

"Now look here, Roosevelt," he said, "let 
me talk. I'm running this course." The 
storm had gone in a playful gust. 

No wonder Roosevelt loved this soldier, 
writer, scientist and man of action, who had 
walked round the coast of the British Isle on 

35 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

a pleasure jaunt. If one could detect the in- 
fluence one man has on another, half the prob- 
lem of biography would be solved, but this be- 
loved old man was long a peculiar inspiration 
to Harvard men. "Is it a mere conceit," as 
Mr. Ranlett asks, " to think that from the 
study of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, keen ob- 
server, good fighter, good friend, hater of 
shams, some strong and vital emanation of 
spirit may have passed into the character of 
Theodore Roosevelt?" 



36 



CHAPTER IV. 



AS AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNALIST 



ONE autumn afternoon in his senior year 
Roosevelt moved about among the 
shelves of the college library seeking 
a subject for a forensic theme. Quite una- 
ware that in that busy and ordinary place he 
was to take his first great stride into the 
world's activities, he stood before one shelf 
after another, his hands deep in his trousers 
pockets. Now he pulled down a book, only to 
shove it energetically back into place, now he 
rested one in his left hand and turned its 
leaves with his right. Finally he reached for 
a dusty green-backed old volume crowded 
against the wall. With real affection he 
glanced at the well-worn name of the author — 
the author he had loved as a boy for his tales 
of sea and of war, that popular writer a few 
generations ago, James Fenimore Cooper. 

37 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

But now boyish days were past and not as 
a boy did he turn the dog-eared leaves. He 
remembered his uncle, a naval officer, regret- 
ting that there was no trustworthy historian 
of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. At 
a time when unprejudiced assertion was un- 
looked for and partiality was considered pat- 
riotism, James had written for Englishmen, 
Cooper for Americans. Only absolute fair- 
ness, Roosevelt knew, only a mind so precise 
that Americans and Englishmen must agree 
with it, could reconcile their works. He 
seated himself at one of the long reading ta- 
bles with the dusty old volume in front of 
him and thought no more of his college theme 
that day. 

A few months later the "Crimson" said that 
a "prominent member of ' '80' had of late 
'turned editor.' " Two years later this prom- 
inent member had finished "The Naval War 
of 1812." In the preface occurred these words: 

"It is worth while to study with some care 
that period of our history during which our 
navy stood at the highest pitch of its fame; 
and to learn anything from its past it is neces- 
sary to know, as near as may be, the exact 

38 



AS AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNALIST 

truth. Accordingly the work should be writ- 
ten impartially, if only from the narrowest 
motives. Without abating a jot from one's 
devotion to his country and flag, I think a 
history can be made just enough to warrant its 
being received as an authority equally among 
Americans and Englishmen." 

Only a short time afterwards the English- 
men themselves recognized the young Ameri- 
can historian by asking him to write the chap- 
ter on the naval operations of the War of 1812 
for the "History of the Royal Navy." 

Roosevelt dived deeper into literature than 
he had first planned to do, for his avowed pro- 
fession during the last years of his college 
course was journalism. 

The perfect education of a journalist is an 
old question which educators have argued, 
about which our greatest journalists have 
agreed. They have been consonant in this: 
that a journalist should have a plenteous store 
of information about all a newspaper is con- 
cerned with; that he must learn to work as 
persistently as news is in coming in; that he 
must get on with his fellows, must know how 
to writ* clearly, accurately and fearlessly. 

39 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

Even when in college Roosevelt seems to 
have felt that a journalist should know some- 
thing about everything — enough business to 
discover a merchant's profits, enough theology 
to criticise the reasoning of the preacher, 
enough law to judge of the logic of the lawyer, 
enough general information to understand the 
bulletins of a physician, the machinations of 
politician or pawnbroker. He set about to 
store this information with the scientific zeal 
with which he strove to build up a weak 
body. He fed habitually on what was at hand ; 
if a newspaper or a book he studied it; if a 
college lecture he questioned; if he walked in 
the fields, he studied nature; if rowing, he 
watched the toiling oarsmen in the next 
wherry; if an athletic contest, he noted how 
the runner braced and flung himself forward 
at the shot ; if a meeting with his fellows round 
a fireside or under the elms in the Yard he 
studied them and learned the secrets of their 
personalities, discovered their weaknesses and 
their powers. The naturalist looks out on the 
universe from the point of view of a naturalist ; 
the physicist, lawyer and moralist look out 
from theirs; the student of languages glances 
over his book on a certain perspective, a per- 

40 



AS AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNALIST 

spective differing from that of the scientist in 
his laboratory or the mathematician in his 
study. Each of these men, every man in all the 
world, sees his surroundings in a certain in- 
dividual light, and each observes more sharply 
within a certain familiar field. This rule of 
familiarity holds in the smallest acts of life — 
the winding of a watch, the stroke of a tennis 
racquet. Consider now from what different 
points of view, with what enthusiasm for each, 
this self-centered youth must have looked on 
all that goes to make environment. 

"Never have I seen or read of a man with 
such an amazing array of interests," says Hon. 
John Woodbury, one of Roosevelt's classmates. 
"He used to stop men in the Yard, or call them 
to him. Then he would block the narrow 
gravel path and soon make sparks from an 
argument fly. He was so enthusiastic and had 
such a startling array of deeply-rooted inter- 
ests that we all thought he would make a great 
journalist." 

No one has denied that Roosevelt has a 
ponderous store of fact, no one has denied that 
he is a relentless worker, that he gets on with 
his fellows, that he writes clearly, accurately, 
and fearlessly. Yet these are the simpler 

4i 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

characteristics that great journalists thought 
necessary to their profession. And who will 
deny that Roosevelt has the intuitive power 
of a great public leader, a power that runs 
along ahead, coach-dog fashion, pointing out 
the way that slow-moving public opinion is to 
traverse? He had that power of rushing to 
conclusions when an undergraduate. In the 
man it has been called impulse, politics, or 
radicalism. 

Roosevelt's is the typification of the Ameri- 
can mind. His conclusions seem to come in- 
tuitively, as quickly as those of a woman, with 
quite as surprising rapidity as Jackson's did 
a century ago. It makes him dangerous in 
theory; in practice it makes him immensely 
popular. 

Although the similarity has not been pointed 
out, he is remarkably like Jackson in many 
ways. A few years ago the nation thundered 
applause for the doughty leader of the Rough- 
Riders, a century before the rash old soldier 
thundered at his troops in the Everglades ; the 
leader of the Rough-Riders had entered poli- 
tics as an avocation and the indomitable old 
man before him was forced to do so ; the young 
element of the West found an ideal in Roose- 

42 



AS AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNALIST 

velt and demanded his nomination as Vice- 
President, just as a century before the young 
men came out of the Mississippi Valley and 
put Jackson into office ; there he waged war 
on a Congress often recalcitrant or inert by 
appealing to public opinion, and a century 
later Roosevelt's relations with Congress were 
almost the same. What will be remembered, 
however, as even more remarkable than the 
similarity in their relations to history, will be 
that both had this peculiar type of intuitive 
mind, acting not merely in politics but in the 
smallest affairs of life. 

But Roosevelt has, what Jackson did not 
have — that bigness of soul found so gloriously 
common in the utterances of the great men of 
Greece and Rome. To the spirit of many of 
these men, Thucydides, for one, the spirit of 
Roosevelt's utterances is remarkably analo- 
gous. His messages and the "Strenuous Life" 
have been found adapted to translation into 
Greek and into Latin. Nevertheless, if we may 
judge by random selections, we have the puzzl- 
ing consideration that Roosevelt employs 
fewer words of classic origin than Lincoln did, 
and Lincoln, we know, used in some passages 
fewer Latinized words than are found on many 

4a 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

pages of the "Pilgrim's Progress," the ideal 
typification of almost pure Saxon. 

Roosevelt has, apparently, fewer words of 
Latin derivation in his messages than in his 
essays, fewer still in his letters* — the less 
literary is his effort, the fewer words of classic 
derivation does he use. He employs only as 
many such words as are absolutely necessary 
to make his meaning clear, in fact sometimes 
he chooses several Saxon words where one 
Latinized one would suffice. Even as an un- 
dergraduate he preferred the Saxon. His com- 
positions then, such as are preserved, although 
about athletics, a subject which requires ex- 
pressions of modern origin, have even fewer 
of the old words than his later writings. He 
loves classic literature, evidently, and reads 
it for what it is, but loves his own literature 
better and finds it more in harmony with the 
expression of his thoughts. Doubtless in dic- 
tating — for he dictates nearly everything he 
writes — he uses the first word that comes into 
his mind, and such words are usually Saxon. 
This fondness for modern languages has never 
left him open to the accusation of not making 
his meaning clear; his utterances percolate to 
the most uneducated and to the most cultured, 

44 



AS AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNALIST 

and, like a wandering prince, everywhere he 
is understood and the force of what he says 
is felt. 

So Roosevelt's bigness of soul is not literary 
skill; it must be personality. In Lincoln's 
speech at Gettysburg there is more than great 
benignant earnestness, more than a certain 
restraint and the feeling of war itself, more 
than a wonderful choice of words, "there is 
something else there." This unknown quality 
is found, though in a less degree, in Washing- 
ton's Farewell Address. If Lincoln had been 
a contented lawyer during the years previous 
to his famous speech instead of a sad-faced 
man watching the nation crush at his feet like 
floating ice, if Washington had been a con- 
tented farmer instead of a disheartened soldier 
and a maligned President, their words would 
not have fallen like flakes of fire ; the distin- 
guished strength would have been wanting. 
It seems to come from only a great personality 
kindled by intense emotion. Roosevelt has not 
suffered as Lincoln or Washington did, yet 
he has suffered more acutely than most men. 
At one time he was hurrying from Europe to 
the funeral of his fair young wife, to the death- 
bed of his beautiful little mother. At another 

45 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

time a dying President lay in a city quaking 
with shouldering crowds, and afar off, amid 
the balmy febrifuge of mountains and pines, 
he was pacing back and forth before a lighted 
cottage, awaiting the word that was to raise 
him to the highest office of his nation. Such 
a crisis fired the soul of Vice-President Ar- 
thur with new strength ; perhaps it gave Roose- 
velt that peculiar power that makes his utter- 
ances so effective. 

Roosevelt's writings first impress one as ad- 
monitory, for it is the privilege of a public man 
to be admonitory, then as friendly, then as 
almost paternal. No man ever knew the power 
of iteration better than he. He would have 
made a great preacher and there is room for 
one. "Without being fanciful, we may fairly 
think" that this pleading for the ideal "comes 
down to him from those ancestors of his own 
who died in the dykes of Holland, for the 
freedom of their country and for their re- 
ligious faith or who gave up their lives in 
support of the Convenant among the rugged 
hills of Scotland." 

So Roosevelt is sincere, Roosevelt is earnest, 
Roosevelt is a practical idealist. Now let us 
go back thirty years and see if all these char- 

46 



AS AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNALIST 

acteristics are not found in a single excerpt 
from one of his editorials in the "Harvard 
Advocate : 

*The football season is now fairly opened 
and it is well to take a glance at what our 
rivals are doing ... At present it hardly seems 
as if the team would be as good as last year's, 
but their playing is improving every day, and 
nothing but very hard work will enable our 
men to win the victory . . . What is most nec- 
essary is, that every man should realize the 
necessity of faithful and honest work, every 
afternoon. Last year we had good individual 
players, but they did not work together nearly 
as well as the Princeton team, and were not 
in as good condition as the Yale men. The 
football season is short; and while it does last, 
the men ought to work faithfully, if they ex- 
pect to win back for Harvard the position she 
held three years ago." 

Seldom do undergraduates rise up and 
preach to other undergraduates; usually they 
only strive to be agreeable. Yet this excerpt 
is from one of three little sermons wedged in 
college trivialities and fun. They stand out 
because they are so earnest, because they are 

47 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

frank, because they preach, they preach the 
doctrines of hard work. 

Roosevelt was not active as an undergraduate 
journalist. The three articles that he wrote, 
two of which are signed by the initial "R," 
were arranged for at a meeting of the editorial 
board of the paper shortly before the issue of 
October 17, 1879, in which they appeared and 
in which his editorialship was announced. . He 
did not enter a competition for his place on the 
board but was made an editor, Professor Hart, 
who was President, says, because he was rec- 
ognized as an able writer. He rarely attended 
the meetings of the board. Though not lack- 
ing in enthusiasm he was overwhelmed with 
accumulating activities. About this time he 
resigned from his office in the Natural History 
Society. He was at work on his book, and, 
moreover, he was all but engaged to Miss 
Lee. 



48 



CHAPTER V 



IN ATHLETICS 



IT is a remarkable fact that Roosevelt, the 
frail little freshman of a hundred pounds, 
thoiigh he could not hope to attain a place 
on any crew or team representing Harvard, 
could not, in truth, hope to win in any individ- 
ual contest of physical strength, should have 
accomplished out of mere enthusiasm, perhaps, 
more for American athletics than any man in 
his class; for to Roosevelt is due in no small 
measure the credit of founding the dual track 
meets between Harvard and Yale. 

In his senior year, in a letter over his initial 
to the "Advocate," he urged that the impulse 
needed to make track athletics at Harvard 
what they should be was a series of contests 
with Yale in the spring and fall of each year. 
In the next issue the "Advocate" said that the 
Yale papers upheld the plan but Yale herself 
was without any "official association to act 

49 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

in the matter." Four years later, by vote of 
the few Yale men who evinced an interest in 
track athletics, Howard Stafford Brooks was 
elected captain, and he straightway set to 
work to raise a thousand dollars from the 
graduates of the two universities for the pur- 
chase of a cup. Not long afterwards the two 
teams began their regular contests in the 
spring and fall which later, because of the 
popularity of football, were resolved into the 
single great contest still held each spring. 

About the time dual meets were suggested 
by Roosevelt all sports seemed to be taking on 
new life. It was long before the stadium, giant 
grandstands, and tens of thousands of spec- 
tators; then the two colleges were struggling 
for what in the public eye stood not only for 
supremacy in American athletics but the su- 
premacy of American colleges as well. With 
its onlookers standing round the uneven field 
a football game between the greatest of Ameri- 
can colleges was like a high-school game now. 
But even then the undergraduate heart at Har- 
vard beat faster at the mention of Yale. 

Harvard played her first football game with 
Yale in the fall of 1876, when Roosevelt was 
a freshman. She had played Canadian teams 

5o 



IN ATHLETICS 

as early as 1874 in both the spring and fall. 
In 1875 the team lost to Princeton but won 
from Columbia, Tufts, and McGill. No game 
was played with Yale because she insisted on 
playing with eleven men and Harvard's games 
had all been played with fifteen. This differ- 
ence was settled and enthusiasm ran rife when 
the first game between the two universities 
was announced for November 18, 1876, at New 
Haven. 

"At two o'clock," the correspondent of the 
"Advocate" wrote, "we were on our way to 
Hamilton Park, a mile or two from the Col- 
lege. The field is an excellent one, but the 
preparations were wretched. Pieces of clothes- 
line supplied the places of cross-bars on two 
very short goal-posts; there was nothing on 
one side and only a faint streak of lime on the 
other, to mark the touch-lines; and nothing 
but a guess could indicate the centre of the 
field, where the ball was to be placed for the 
kick-off. The two teams made a very pretty 
appearance on the field in their bright new 
uniforms." 

Yale won this game by a single goal though 
Harvard — for they scored differently then — 
got three touchdowns. Two years later Yale 

5i 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

won another game at Boston and the follow- 
ing year the most exciting contest held up to 
that time in America was fought to a tie on 
the Yale grounds. The year Roosevelt was 
graduated Harvard lost to Yale. 

In baseball, however, an older and more es- 
tablished sport, Harvard was winning year af- 
ter year. In 1876 her team was victorious in 
two of the three games played, and so again 
in 1877; in 1878 and 1879 the Harvard team 
won three of five games in each year, one in 
the latter year, a shut-out. In 1880 each team 
won two games. 

In the crew races, too, Harvard was victor- 
ious over Yale. She won in the first three 
years Roosevelt was in college but lost in 
1880. That year, in fact, was disastrous to 
all the Harvard teams, and, though Roosevelt's 
class might have found some solace in the fact 
that its freshman football team had defeated 
Yale's, yet the freshmen crew lost its race 
at Saratoga to Cornell, and in the class races, 
which were begun in Roosevelt's junior year, 
eighty was last in one race and not far from 
last in the other. 

Lacrosse and cricket were almost unknown 
at Harvard, and to play tennis designated what 

52 



IN ATHLETICS 

Roosevelt has called a molly-coddle ; the under- 
graduate papers were continually poking fun 
at the effeminate men who were addicted to 
this new pastime, and, although a tournament 
was held, it was not until 1883 that a team rep- 
resenting Harvard was organized. 

In this day of the beginning of indoor athlet- 
ics, and till the completion of the Hemenway 
Gymnasium in 1880, they were held in what 
is now the Germanic Museum. In some of 
the meets there were but one or two entries. 
The accommodations, as one of the college 
papers described in 1876, were wholly inade- 
quate : 

"There are freshmen playing around like 
calves in a meadow, getting in everyone's way, 
and, in their childlike innocence, deluding 
themselves with the belief that they are ex- 
ercising. There are boating men and grinds, 
and vain men and modest men, all breathing 
the same bad air. One has to wait his turn 
at almost every piece of apparatus, and several 
pieces it is impossible to use at all, on ac- 
count of the lack of room; while it is impos- 
sible to move around without running the risk 
of a broken head from an Indian club, or the 

53 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

external application of a dumbbell to the pit 
of the stomach." 

Here Roosevelt used to exercise religiously 
and here at least one furtive freshman is re- 
called as having met him. He was exercising 
one day when he observed next to the ap- 
paratus he was using a set of parallel bars be- 
tween which another freshman pushed himself 
backward and forward more violently and 
more rapidly than any one else. When all out 
of breath, he dropped to the floor and gasped : 
"My name's Roosevelt. What's yours?" 

He showed his interest in all branches of 
athletics. Classmates recall him as a foot- 
ball scrub with a bright red jersey, tripping 
about Holmes Field, the man with the morn- 
ing in his face. He had announced his inten- 
tion of entering a light-weight sparring con- 
test from which his classmate, William A. 
Gaston, who was heavier and stronger, with- 
drew to make a place for him. For this Roose- 
velt was anxious to assist his friend in some 
way so he encouraged him to enter a wrestling 
match — but Mr. Gaston has told the story : 

"The rules for wrestling matches in those 
days were arbitrary — different at each meet- 
ing according to the views of the umpire. If 

54 



IN ATHLETICS 

you thought a decision unfair, all you could 
do was to appeal to the committee in charge of 
athletics. 

"There was going to be a lightweight 
wrestlirig match. I hesitated about entering 
it. Roosevelt said, 'Come on, Bill, I'll train 
you.' He didn't know any more about wrestl- 
ing than I did. The first day I threw two men 
and had just got the first fall from a third 
when the umpire called off the sports for the 
day, insisting that the last fall I had got should 
not count. Of course that meant that I should 
have to throw my opponent three times and 
he throw me but twice to win a victory. Roose- 
velt banged his foot down on the floor. 'Out- 
rageous ! Bill, it's outrageous ! Come on, we'll 
go and appeal to the committee.' 

"-'Now Bill, you're hot-tempered,' he warned 
as we approached them. 'I don't want you to 
say a word. I'll talk to them. I'll explain 
this thing.' In ten minutes Roosevelt had of- 
fered to fight everyone of them. I had to pac- 
ify him and smooth things over. We won our 
point though." 

Roosevelt weighed but a hundred and thirty- 
five pounds when he entered the lightweight 
sparring contest, the only event he ever en- 

55 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

tered. There were only six contestants, the 
"Advocate" says. "In the first bout Mr. 
Hanks won. The second bout, between Mr. 
Coolidge and Mr. Roosevelt, was won by the 
latter, who displayed more skill and coolness 
than his opponent. Mr. Cushing easily won 
the last bout. 

"Mr. Hanks was then paired with Mr. 
Roosevelt, and a spirited contest followed, in 
which Mr. Hanks succeeded in getting the 
best of his opponent by his quickness and 
power of endurance." 

"It was no fight at all," says one of the 
students who were gathered round the toiling 
men. "Hanks had the longer reach and was 
stronger and Roosevelt was handicapped by 
his eyesight. I can see that little fellow yet, 
staggering about and banging into air. His 
opponent could not put him out and he would 
not give up. He showed his fighting qualities, 
but he never entered another bout." 

In his vacations and in one Christmas re- 
cess, while hunting in the Maine woods, Roose- 
velt showed his grit in other ways. "He was 
undersized for eighteen," William W. Sewall, 
his guide, writes, "but what he lacked in 
strength he made up for in courage. "He had 

56 



IN ATHLETICS 

enough moral and physical courage for a man 
who weighed a ton." One day when the snow 
was deep and they were tramping through the 
white woods after caribou Roosevelt lost one 
of his snowshoes while fording a rapid stream, 
but with only moccasins he insisted on climb- 
ing Mt. Katahdin, to where they were camped. 
His feet were terribly bruised but he had not 
uttered a whimper. In the West, a few years 
later, Mr. Sewall says, Roosevelt's horse reared 
and fell on him, breaking the point of his 
shoulder blade, nevertheless he kept to the 
trail for three days before the injury was at- 
tended to by a physician. His bravery crop- 
ped out one day when he heard that a cowboy 
rough had threatened to shoot him full of 
holes. Roosevelt looked for the man, rode up 
to him, and asked him if the report was true. 
The cowboy promptly denied it. He was also 
threatened with a real French duel by a real 
Frenchman, but he took such vehement delight 
in furthering arrangements that the opponent 
apolo'gized and actually invited Roosevelt to 
dinner. 

Some students take their exercise as others 
go to church — sighing on their way, bringing 
a subject to cogitate on while there, and exult- 

57 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

ing when the thing is done with. But in exer- 
cise Roosevelt showed the practical applica- 
tion of an earnest man. Probably today he 
relishes no more exquisite gratification than 
knowing that not only did he accomplish much 
by his enthusiasm, but that he has consciously 
built up the weak frame of the little freshman 
who entered college thirty-five years ago into 
the body of a strong man. 



58 



CHAPTER VI 



GRADUATION. 



WHEN Roosevelt's class put out from 
college to lose itself in the classes of 
two hundred and fifty years, the 
Advocate commented on the number of prom- 
inent men it contained — men prominent in 
scholarship, in literary ability, in executive 
talent, in athletics ; but the Crimson could find 
use for no adjectives stronger than creditable, 
good, and average. And now the years have 
gone by and no class within twenty years of it, 
perhaps no class in the two centuries Harvard 
has given men to the nation, has cut so deeply 
and in so many ways in the activities of the 
world. In it were Albert Bushnell Hart, edi- 
tor, teacher, historian ; Robert Winsor and Ar- 
thur Perry, successful Boston financiers; Doc- 
tor Henry Baldwin, noted alienist; Arthur 
Hale, general superintendent of transportation 
of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and the late 

59 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

Henry B. Chapin, general traffic manager of 
the Boston & Albany; John Woodbury, secre- 
tary of the Metropolitan Park Commission of 
Boston; Richard W. Welling, chairman of the 
Civil Service Commission of New York City 
by appointment of Mayor Gaynor; William S. 
Andrews, judge, New York Supreme Court; 
William A. Pew, colonel of Spanish War Vol- 
unteers; Charles G. Washburn, Congressman; 
William A. Gaston, organizer of the Metropoli- 
tan Street Railway system of Boston, repeat- 
edly a nominee for governor; Josiah Quincy, 
assistant secretary of state, Mayor of Boston, 
nominee for 'governor ; Robert Bacon, secretary 
of State, ambassador to France; Theodore 
Roosevelt, President of the United States. 

Imperceptibly, as unconscious as a tree 
grows, these men were rounded out by four 
years of association. Although genius is not 
infectious, the homely virtues are, and by these 
Roosevelt and his classmates have risen. 
Never were the benefits of friendship better 
exemplified than by the careers of two of 
those eight men of whom Roosevelt was one, 
who gathered together for their meals through 
their four years at Harvard. One of them, G. 
Gorham Peters, has suffered ill health; of the 

60 



GRADUATION 

other seven, Richard M. Saltonstall, Roose- 
velt's nearest college friend, is a leading Bos- 
ton attorney ; Ralph N. Ellis, 1a successful busi- 
ness man; Charles Ware, a successful physi- 
cian; C. Minot Weld, a millionaire cotton bro- 
ker ; Henry G. Chapin was at his death general 
traffic manager of the Boston & Albany Rail- 
road ; Charles G. Washburn is head of a large 
wire corporation and a prominent Congress- 
man ; Theodore Roosevelt, Ex-President of the 
United States. 

Yet these men never knew their strertgth 
till, like fishermen in their yawls, they put out 
alone. There was George von L. Meyer, in 
the class of '79, with whom Roosevelt loved to 
talk about undergraduate athletics, later to 
swing alongside and be his postmaster-general 
in the conduct of a nation; there was Bacon, 
whose election as captain of the freshman crew 
Roosevelt opposed, destined to be his secretary 
of state; and Leonard Wood, a freshman in 
the Medical school when Roosevelt was a sen- 
ior in the College, and Curtis Guild, Jr., neither 
of whom Roosevelt more than knew, both of 
whom became his intimate friends during the 
Spanish War, after which Roosevelt secured 
Wood's election to the only honorary member- 

61 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

ship in the class of 1880; there was Henry 
Cabot Lodge, a writer and an instructor in 
history in Harvard College, whom Roosevelt 
did not like and whose courses he refused to 
take because he thought he "marked papers too 
hard," to whom he was to be tied by the bond 
of friendship when each became the champion 
of his respective state in supporting the move- 
ment to nominate Edmunds for President in 
1884. There was C. S. Hanks, who pummelled 
Roosevelt in a boxing match and years later 
rose into publicity with the assertion that he 
could get from scheming railroads information 
that the President could not get, who was told 
to go ahead, who failed, and died soon after- 
wards; Professor Sumner of Yale, who ad- 
dressed the Finance Club, Charles Eliot Nor- 
ton, president of the Art Club — two old guards 
of anti-imperialism, two strong foes of expan- 
sion, whom Roosevelt oppugned with all his 
might. There was President Charles William 
Eliot. 

One day a committee of students climbed 
to the office of the austere educator, who rose 
from his desk chair to greet them. There was 
a pause. "Gentlemen," said the President, ex- 
pectantly. Then the student with the most 

62 



GRADUATION 

words to his tongue stammered forth an intro- 
duction, after this fashion: "Mr. Eliot, I am 
President Roosevelt." Too prophetic perhaps 
to be believed, yet true. 

As for the undergraduate, Roosevelt, if there 
is any virtue taught by his student life it is 
wide-awake practicality. Intensated by all 
the starts and sallies of his capricious tempera- 
ment Roosevelt's life is there in the records, 
the life of a deliberator. Opportunists do not 
set out in lifelong struggles to build up their 
bodies, nor plan with care their mental pur- 
suits, nor value the shifting moment. But 
Roosevelt did all these things. If this spirit 
of deliberation were applied to the capturing 
of an office it would be called, opprobriously, 
ambition, but if that is ambition, then all really 
sucessful men are ambitious; for without 
power to discover his own needs, to survey 
his own course, to forge ahead, a man is like 
a ship without a rudder, drifting. 

Roosevelt was no dream child drifting on a 
tranquil stream to fame. He labored all his 
way. Thirty-five years ago we saw that he 
dropped from a horse car in Harvard Square, 
thin-chested spectacled, nervous and frail. 
Now there hangs in the living room of the 

63 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

Harvard Union, after all this distance and 
change, the portrait of a sturdy, gray-locked 
figure, watchful, decisive, confident, — looking 
down on the endless procession of youth. The 
little freshman of thirty-five years ago has 
become a strong man. 



64 



PART II. 



PART II. 



CLASS REPORTS. 

AT stated intervals it is the custom for 
each Harvard graduate to furnish his 
class secretary with a brief outline of the 
principal incidents in his career for publica- 
tion in the class reports. 

The following, which includes such extracts 
from Mr. Roosevelt's letters to the secretary 
as he has seen fit to quote, have appeared in 
the reports of the class of 1880. 

COMMENCEMENT, 1883. 

During the winter of 1880-81, the sec- 
retary of the class supplied the information 
that Roosevelt attended the Columbia College 
Law School. Was married October 27, 1880 to 
Alice H. Lee of Chestnut Hill, Mass. Spent 
the summer of 1881 in Europe, and while in 
Switzerland ascended the Matterhorn and 
Jungfrau. 

In November, 1881, ran for the New York 

6% 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

Legislature from the Twenty-first Assembly 
District, and was elected by 1,500 majority, 
running 50 ahead of the ticket. Writes as 
follows: "Paid attention chiefly, while in the 
Legislature, to laws for the reformation of 
Primaries and of the Civil Service; and en- 
deavored to have a certain Judge Westbrook 
impeached on the ground of corrupt collusion 
with Jay Gould and the prostitution of his 
high judicial office to serve the purpose of 
wealthy and unscrupulous stock-gamblers, but 
was voted down." In November, 1882, ran 
again and was elected by 2,400 majority, run- 
ning 2,000 ahead of the ticket. On January 1, 
1883, was nominated by the Republican legis- 
lative caucus as candidate for Speaker. As 
the Democrats had the majority this was 
merely a complimentary nomination as leader 
of the Republican side of the House. 

Has written "The Naval War of 1812," pub- 
lished in 1882 by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New 
York ; and various political pamphlets. 

(A picture of the Hon. Theodore Roosevelt 
appeared in Harper's Weekly, April 21, 1883) 

COMMENCEMENT, 1886. 
In 1883 Roosevelt was elected for the third 

68 



CLASS REPORTS 

time to the New York Assembly. He was 
made chairman of the Committee on Cities, 
the most important position next to that of 
Speaker, and also of a Legislative Investigat- 
ing Committee which did more work than had 
ever been done by a similar body. As chair- 
man of the committee he introduced and passed 
a series of laws which practically revolution- 
ized the municipal government of New York. 

In 1884 he captured the State Republican 
Convention for Edmunds as against Blaine 
and Arthur, and went as the head of the New 
York delegation to the National Republican 
Convention. In the ensuing presidential cam- 
paign he took part on the Republican side, 
speaking in New York, New England and 
New Jersey. He refused a nomination to the 
Assembly, and also refused two nominations 
for Congress. 

In 1885 he opened the Republican campaign 
in Northern Ohio, and spoke also in New York 
and Massachusetts. 

Writes as follows from Elkhorn Ranch, 
Medora, North Dakota, April 15, 1886: 

"In 1883 and since have spent most of my 
summers on my cattle ranch on the Little 
Missouri in western Dakota, or in making 

69 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

hunting trips from it after bear, elk, buffalo, 
etc. 

"In 1883 published an enlarged edition of 
my 'Naval War of 1812/ In 1885 wrote 
'Hunting Trips of a Ranchman,' have just got 
out a second American and a first English edi- 
tion. Have contributed a number of political 
essays and sketches of sport and adventure 
to the Century Magazine, the North American 
and New Princeton Reviews, and to Harpers.' 

"In New York am a member of the Century, 
Union League, University and other clubs, in- 
cluding the Meadowbrook, as I am fond of 
riding to hounds. Have now built a country 
house at Sagamore Hill, my place at Oyster 
Bay, Long Island, where I intend to live. 

"My time has been pretty nearly divided 
between ranching, literature and politics. My 
address is New York. 
APRIL 10, 1890: 

"In the fall of 1886 I ran for Mayor of New 
York on the Citizens' and Republican ticket, 
against Henry George, the labor candidate, 
and Abram S. Hewitt, the nominee of the 
united Democracy, who was elected. In the 
presidential campaign of 1888 I was on the 
stump for the Republican ticket. On May 10, 

70 



CLASS REPORTS 

1889, I was appointed United States Civil Ser- 
vice Commissioner, and for the past year have 
been up to my ears in one unending fight to 
take and keep the Civil Service out of the 
hands of politicians, and I may say without 
question that during this year the law has 
been observed in the classified service under 
our charge more rigidly and more impartially 
than ever before. 

"In 1886 I wrote the 'Life of Thomas Hart 
Benton,' in the American Statesmen series, 
and in 1887 the 'Life of Gouverneur Morris' 
for the same series. In 1888 I published my 
'Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail,' and in 
1889 the first two volumes of 'The Winning 
of the West.' Have contributed a number of 
political essays and sketches of sport to the 
Century, St. Nicholas, Murray's Magazine 
(London), etc. 

"Made a trip through Europe in the winter 
of 1886-87. I spend a couple of months on my 
ranch or hunting in the Rockies each year, 
and the rest of my time on my place at Saga- 
more Hill, except for a winter visit to New 
York. This year I have been obliged by my 
official duties to live most of the time in Wash- 
ington." 

71 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

Washington, D. C, March 25, 1895— ."Since 
1890 my residence has been Washington, 
in winter, Oyster Bay, Long Island, in sum- 
mer, except when I was on my ranch on the 
Little Missouri or on a hunting trip. I have 
been United States Civil Service Commissioner 
all the time, having been appointed such May 
9, 1889. 

"I now have five children. My third child, 
a second son, Kermit, was born October 15, 
1889, my fourth child, Ethel, August 10, 1891, 
my fifth child, Archibald Bulloch, April 9, 
1894. 

"I haven't made any journey in foreign coun- 
tries, save a flying trip to Erigland and France 
early in '91, but I have made several hunting 
trips in the Rocky Mountains, which were a 
good deal more important and interesting than 
going to Europe. 

"Civil Service Commissioner is about all the 
office I have held. 

"My 'History of New York' was published 
in 1891; my 'Wilderness Hunter' in 1893, the 
third volume of the 'Winning of the West' in 
1894. I have written for the Century, Atlan- 
tic Monthly, and Forum on various occasions, 
but I do not recollect the dates and titles of the 

72 



CLASS REPORTS 

pieces now. I don't remember how many ad- 
dresses I have made at public meetings. 

"Except the fact that I have been annually 
investigated by Congress and have made about 
monthly investigations of other officials my- 
self I do not know that I have had many in- 
teresting experiences, unless you include bear 
hunting in the list." 

Roosevelt resigned as United States Civil 
Service Commissioner April 30, 1895, having 
been appointed by Mayor Strong Police Com- 
missioner of New York City, which office he 
accepted and still holds. 



COMMENCEMENT, 1900 

"I shall be at the dinner. 

"Answering your questions : I am now Gov- 
ernor of New York, having been elected in 
November, 1898. Since writing you, five years 
ago, I have been assistant secretary of the 
Navy under President McKinley's administra- 
tion, and lieutenant-colonel and afterwards 
colonel of the First United States Volunteer 
Cavalry in the war with Spain, being brevetted 
as brigadier-general and acting as such in com- 
mand of the Second Brigade of the Cavalry 

73 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

Division during the latter part of the Santiago 
campaign. 

"On November 17, 1898, I had a son, Quen- 
tin, born to me. I now have four sons and two 
daughters. 

"June, 1899, Columbia University made me 
an LL. D. 

"I have published 'American Ideals,' 'The 
Rough Riders,' and a 'Life of Cromwell.' 

"Member Board of Overseers of Harvard 
College, term expiring 1901." 

COMMENCEMENT, 1910. 

He was Governor of New York from Janu- 
ary 1, 1898 to December 31, 1900. He was 
Vice-President of the United States from 
March 4, 1901, until September 14, 1901, when, 
on the death of President McKinley, he suc- 
ceeded to the office of President. He was 
elected President of the United States on No- 
vember 8, 1904, by the largest vote ever given 
to a candidate for that office, and was inaugu- 
rated on March 4, 1905. 



74 



PART III 



PART III 



ADDRESSES 



LONG after Roosevelt, the undergraduate, 
had put out from Harvard, he addressed 
the college men of America. On one oc- 
casion through the pages of the "Harvard 
Graduates' Magazine;" on the other in an ad- 
dress at the Harvard Union. Both were able 
and vigorous pleas for the rational idealism 
which he in his college life had in a large 
measure given expression to. So few men re- 
tain the ideals of early youth that no feature 
of these mature expressions of opinion on Mr. 
Roosevelt's part is of greater interest than the 
marked evidences running through them of the 
unchanging standards which years before he 
had set for himself. 

77 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

THE COLLEGE MAN. 

An Address Delivered at the Harvard Union. 

"It is idle to expect, nor indeed would it 
be desirable, that there should be in col- 
lege a uniform level of taste and associa- 
tion. Some men will excel in one thing and 
some in another; some in things of the body, 
some in things of the mind ; and where thous- 
ands are gathered together each will naturally 
find some group of especially congenial friends 
with whom he will form ties of peculiar social 
intimacy. These groups — athletic, artistic, 
scientific, social — must inevitably exist. My 
plea is not for their abolition. My plea is that 
they shall be got into the right focus in the 
eyes of college men; that the relative impor- 
tance of the different groups shall be under- 
stood when compared with the infinitely 
greater life of the college as a whole. Let 
each man have his special associates, but let 
him remember that he cannot get the full bene- 
fit of life in college if he does nothing but 
specialize; and that, what is even more im- 
portant, he cannot do his full duty by the col- 
lege unless his first and greatest interest is in 

78 



THE COLLEGE MAN 

the college itself, in his associates taken as a 
mass, and not in any small group. 

"Our chief interest should not lie in the 
great champions in sport. On the contrary, 
our concern should be first of all to widen the 
base, the foundation in athletic sports; to en- 
courage in every way a healthy rivalry which 
shall give to the largest possible number of 
students the chance to take part in vigorous 
outdoor games. It is of far more importance 
that a man shall play something himself, even 
if he plays it badly, than that he shall go with 
hundreds of companions to see some one else 
play well, and it is not healthy for either stu- 
dents or athletes if the teams are mutually ex- 
clusive. But even having this aim especially 
in view it seems to me we can best attain it by 
giving proper encouragement to the cham- 
pions in the sports, and this can only be done 
by encouraging intercollegiate contests. As 
I emphatically disbelieve in seeing Harvard or 
any other college turn out mollycoddles, in- 
stead of vigorous men, I may add that I do 
not in the least object to a sport because it 
is rough. Rowing, baseball, lacrosse, track and 
field games, hockey, football, are all of them 
good. ... If necessary, let the college author- 

79 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

ities interfere to stop any excess or perversion, 
making their interference as little officious as 
possible, and yet as rigorous as is necessary 
to achieve the end. There is no justification 
for stopping a thoroughly manly sport because 
it is sometimes abused, when the experience 
of every good preparatory school shows that 
the abuse is in no shape necessarily attendant 
upon the game. We cannot afford to turn 
out of college men who shrink from physical 
effort or from a little physical pain. In any 
republic courage is a prime necessity for the 
average citizen if he is to be a good citizen; 
and he needs physical courage no less than 
moral courage, the courage that dares as well 
as the courage that endures, the courage that 
will fight valiantly alike against the foes of 
the soul and the foes of the body. Athletics 
are good, especially in their rougher forms, 
because they tend to develop such courage. 
They are good also because they encourage 
a true democratic spirit; for in the athletic 
field the man must be judged, not with refer- 
ence to outside and accidental attributes, but 
by that combination of bodily vigor and moral 
quality which go to make up prowess. 
"I trust that I need not add that in defend- 

80 



THE COLLEGE MAN 

ing athletics I would not for one moment be 
understood as excusing that perversion of ath- 
letics which would make it the end of life in- 
stead of merely a means in life. It is first-class 
healthful play, and is useful as such. But 
play is not business, and it is a very poor bus- 
iness indeed for a college man to learn noth- 
ing but sport. There are exceptional cases 
which I do not need to consider; but disre- 
garding these, I cannot with sufficient em- 
phasis say that when you get through college 
you will do badly unless you turn your at- 
tention to the serious work of life with a devo- 
tion which will render it impossible for you 
to pay much heed to sport in the way in which 
it is perfectly proper for you to pay heed 
while in college. Play while you play and 
work while you work; and though play is a 
mighty good thing, remember that you had 
better never play at all than to get into a 
condition of mind where you regard play as 
the serious business of life, or where you per- 
mit it to hamper and interfere with your doing 
your full duty in the real work of the world. 

"A word also to the students. Athletics 
are good; study is even better; and best of 
all is the development of the type of character 

81 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

for the lack of which, in an individual, as in 
a nation, no amount of brilliancy of mind or 
strength of body will atone. Moreover, let 
the students remember that in the long run 
in the field of study judgment must be ren- 
dered upon the quantity of first-class work 
produced in the way of productive scholar- 
ship, and that no amount of second-class work 
can atone for failure in the college to produce 
this first-class work. A course of study is of 
little worth if it tends to deaden individual in- 
itiative and cramp scholars so that they only 
work in the ruts worn deep by many predeces- 
sors. 

"American scholarship will be judged, not 
by the quantity of routine work produced by 
routine workers, but by the small amount of 
first-class output of those who, in whatever 
branch, stand in the first rank. No industry 
in compilation and in combination will ever 
take the place of this first-hand original work, 
this productive and creative work, whether 
in science, in art, in literature. The greatest 
special function of a college, as distinguished 
from its general function of producing good 
citizenship, should be so to shape conditions 
as to put a premium upon the development of 

82 



THE COLLEGE MAN 

productive scholarship, of the creative mind, 
in any form of intellectual work. The men 
whose chief concern lies with the work of the 
student in study should bear this fact ever be- 
fore them. 

"When you college men graduate you will 
take up many kinds of work; but there is one 
work in which all of you should take part 
simply as good American citizens, and that is 
the work of self-government. Remember, in 
the first place, that to take part in the work 
of government does not in the least mean of 
necessity to hold office. It means to take an 
intelligent, disinterested and practical part in 
the everyday duties of the average citizen, of 
the citizen who is not a faddist or a doctrin- 
aire, but who abhors corruption and dislikes 
inefficiency ; who wishes to see decent govern- 
ment prevail at home, with genuine equality 
of opportunity for all men so far as it can be 
brought about, and who wishes, as far as for- 
eign matters are concerned, to see this nation 
treat all other nations, great and small, with 
respect, and if need be with generosity, and at 
the same time show herself able to protect 
herself by her own might from any wrong 
at the hands of any outside power. 

83 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

"Each man should feel that he has no excuse, 
as a citizen in a democratic republic like ours, 
if he fails to do his part in the government. 
It is not only his right to do so, but his duty ; 
his duty both to the nation and to himself. 
Each man should feel that, if he fails in this, he 
is not only failing in his duty, but is showing 
himself in a contemptible light. 

"A man may neglect his political duties be- 
cause he is too lazy, too selfish, too short- 
sighted, or too timid ; but whatever the reason 
may be it is certainly an unworthy reason, 
and it shows either a weakness or worse than 
a weakness in the man's character. Above all, 
you college men, remember that if your edu- 
cation, the pleasant lives you lead, make you 
too fastidious, too sensitive to take part in the 
rough hurly-burly of the actual work of the 
world, if you become overcultivated, so over- 
refined that you cannot do the hard work of 
practical politics, then you had better never 
have been educated at all. 

"The weakling and the coward are out of 
place in a strong and free community. In a 
republic like ours the governing class is com- 
posed of the strong men who take the trouble 
to do the work of government; and if you are 

84 



THE COLLEGE MAN 

too timid or too fastidious or too careless to 
do your part in this work, then you forfeit your 
right to be considered one of the governing 
and you become one of the governed. 

"Like most other things of value, education 
is good only in so far as it is used aright, and 
if it is misused or if it causes the owner to be 
so puffed up with pride as to make him mis- 
estimate the relative value of things, it be- 
comes a harm and not a benefit. There are a 
few things less desirable than the arid culti- 
vation, the learning and refinement which 
lead merely to that intellectual conceit which 
makes a man in a democratic community like 
ours hold himself aloof from his fellows and 
pride himself upon the weakness which he mis- 
takes for supercilious strength. 

"Small is the use of those educated men who 
in after life meet no one but themselves, and 
gather in parlors to discuss wrong conditions 
which they do not understand and to advocate 
remedies which have the prime defect of being 
unworkable. The judgment on practical af- 
fairs, political and social, of educated men who 
keep aloof from the conditions of practical 
life, is apt to be valueless to those other men 
who do really wage effective war against the 

85 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

forces of baseness and evil. From the politi- 
cal standpoint, education is a harm and not 
a benefit to the men whom it serves as an ex- 
cuse for refusing to mingle with their fellows 
and for standing aloof from the broad sweep 
of our national life in a curiously impotent 
spirit of fancied superiority. The political 
wrong-headedness of such men is quite as 
great as that of wholly uneducated men, and 
no people could be less trustworthy as critics 
and advisers. The educated man who seeks to 
console himself for his own lack of the robust 
qualities which bring success in American pol- 
itics by moaning over the degeneracy of the 
times, by railing at the men who do the actual 
work of political life, instead of trying him- 
self to do the work, is a poor creature, and, so 
far as his feeble powers avail, is a damage and 
not a help to the community. You may come 
far short of this disagreeable standard and still 
be a rather useless member of society. Your 
education, your cultivation, will not help you 
if you make the mistake of thinking that it is 
a substitute for, instead of an addition to, those 
qualities which in the struggle of life bring 
success to the ordinary man without your ad- 
vantages. 

86 



THE COLLEGE MAN 

"Your colle'ge training confers no privilege 
upon you save as attested by the use you make 
of it. It puts upon you the obligation to show 
yourselves better able to do certain things than 
your fellows who have not had your advan- 
tages. If it has served merely to make you be- 
lieve that you are excused from effort in after 
life, that you are to be excused from contact 
with the actual world of men and events, then 
it will prove a curse and not a blessing. 

"If, on the other hand, you treat your edu- 
cation as a weapon, a weapon to fit you to do 
better in the hard struggle of effort, and not as 
excusing you in any way from taking part in 
practical fashion in that struggle, then it will 
be a benefit to you. Let each of you college 
men remember in after life than in the fun- 
damentals he is very much like his fellows who 
have not been to college, and if he is to achieve 
results, instead of confining himself exclusively 
to disparagement of other men who achieve 
them, he must manage to come to some kind 
of working agreement with these fellows. 
There are times, of course, when it may be 
the highest duty of a citizen to stand alone 
or practically alone. But if this is a man's 
normal attitude — if normally he is unable to 

87 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

work in combination with a considerable body 
of his fellows — it is safe to set him down as 
unfit for useful service in a democracy. In 
popular government results worth having can 
only be achieved by men who combine worthy 
ideals with practical good sense, who are reso- 
lute to accomplish good purposes, but who can 
accommodate themselves to the give and take 
necessary where work has to be done, as al- 
most all important work must necessarily be 
done, by combination. Moreover, remember 
that normally the prime object of political life 
is to achieve results and not merely to issue 
manifestoes — save, of course, where the is- 
suance of such manifestoes helps to achieve 
the results. 

"It is a very bad thing to be morally cal- 
lous, for moral callousness is a disease. But 
inflammation of the conscience may be just as 
unhealthy, so far as the public is concerned; 
and if a man's conscience is always telling 
him to do something foolish he will do well to 
mistrust its workings. The religious man 
who is useful is not he whose sole care is to 
save his soul, but the man whose religion bids 
him strive to advance decency and clean liv- 
88 



THE COLLEGE MAN 

ing and to make the world a better place for 
his fellows to live in. 

"During the last few years much good has 
been done to the people of the Philippines; 
but this has been done, not by those who 
merely indulged in the personal luxury of ad- 
vocating for the islands a doctrinaire liberty 
which would have meant their immediate and 
irretrievable ruin, but those who have faced 
facts as they actually were, remembering the 
proverb that teaches that in the long run the 
most uncomfortable truth is a safer companion 
than the pleasantest falsehood. 

"There have been some men in public life 
and some men in private life whose action has 
been at every point one of barren criticism 
and fruitless obstruction. These men have 
had no part or lot in the great record of 
achievement and success — the record of good 
work worthily done. Some of these men have 
been college graduates; but all of them have 
been poor servants of the people, useless where 
not harmful. All the credit for the good thus 
accomplished in the public life of this decade 
belongs to those who have done affirmative 
work . . . not to those who, with more or less 

80 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

futility, have sought to hamper and obstruct 
the work that has thus been done, 

"In short, you college men, be doers rather 
than critics of the deeds that others do. Stand 
stoutly for your ideals, but keep in mind that 
they can only be realized, even partially, by 
practical methods of achievement. Remember 
always that this republic of ours is a very 
real democracy, and that you can only win suc- 
cess by showing that you have the right stuff 
in you. The college man, the man of intellect 
and training, should take the lead in every 
fight for civic and social righteousness. He can 
take that lead only if in a spirit of thorough- 
going democracy, if he takes his place among 
his fellows, not standing aloof from them, but 
mixing with them, so that he may know, may 
feel, may sympathize with their hopes, their 
ambitions, their principles and even their prej- 
udices — as an American among Americans, a 
man among men. 



90 



HARVARD MEN IN POLITICS. 

(From Harvard Graduates' Magazine, Oet. 
1892. — By Theodore Roosevelt, '80.) 

A fair proportion of the men who have 
graduated from Harvard during the last 
twenty years or so have gone into public 
life. In a certain sense it is of course 
the duty of every Harvard man to do this. He 
is false to the tradition and spirit of American- 
ism if he does not conscientiously and faith- 
fully perform his political duties; I do not 
mean merely vote, but take an active interest 
in politics and do his part in controlling the 
political organization to which he belongs ' r or, 
if he belongs to none, do his part, in company 
with others who feel as he does, in helping as 
far as may be the political movements or the 
political candidates in which he is interested. 
He can accomplish a certain amount by criti- 
cism if his criticism is intelligent and honest, 
but he can of course accomplish infinitely more 
by action; and possibly it may be of interest 
to Harvard graduates to point out the kind 
of work that is done in politics by those of 
their number who are men of action. 

2 1 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

Massachusetts usually leads in any good 
movement, and so it is not surprising that we 
have to turn first to Massachusetts when we 
think of Harvard graduates in public life. 
There are at this moment many who deserve 
well of their Alma Mater ; and these are among 
both parties, and are to be found in the public 
service of both the nation and the state, — men 
like Governor Russell and Congressmen An- 
drew and Hoar, or like Assistant Secretary of 
State Wharton, Congressman Lodge, and ex- 
Congressman Greenhalge, not to mention the 
many Harvard men who are at the present 
moment members of the Massachusetts state 
or of the Boston municipal legislatures. Speak- 
ing only of that with which I am most familiar, 
I wish to point out some of the ways in which 
Harvard men have been able to do peculiarly 
good work in the national Congress during the 
past few years. 

Often much of the best service that is ren- 
dered in Congress must be done without any 
hope of approbation or reward. The meas- 
ures that attract most attention are frequently 
not those of most lasting importance; and 
even where they are of such importance that 
attention is fixed upon them, the interested 

92 



HARVARD MEN IN POLITICS 

public may not appreciate the difference be- 
tween the man who merely records his vote 
for a bill and the other who throws his whole 
strength into the contest to secure its passage. 
A man must have in him a strong and earnest 
sense of duty and the desire to accomplish 
good for the commonwealth, without regard to 
the effect upon himself, to be useful in Con- 
gress in the way that men like Lodge, Green- 
halge, Andrew, Hoar, or George Adams of Chi- 
cago, are useful. 

Take the work that these men have done on 
subjects like the Copyright Bill, the building 
of the navy, legislation in the interest of scien- 
tific bodies, such as the Smithsonian Institu- 
tion, and various bills affecting Civil Service 
Reform. There is great popular interest in 
certain quarters about the navy ; but I am sorry 
to say that I do not think that this interest 
is always sufficiently keen to make the pub- 
lic intelligent in backing up the men who strive 
to make our naval policy consistent and steady. 
There is no kind of legislation more intimately 
connected with the national honor than that 
affecting the navy; yet during this very ses- 
sion of Congress we have not only seen nar- 
row-minded Congressmen from interior dis- 

93 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

tricts strenuously opposing the building of the 
navy, but also at least passive help extended 
to them by certain representatives from dis- 
tricts which are intelligently interested in our 
maritime supremacy. It would be difficult to 
overestimate the amount of good work done, 
without any hope of recognition therefor, by 
the men who have taken the chief part in pre- 
paring and pushing through the naval legis- 
lation, first on the naval committees of the two 
Houses, and then through the legislative 
bodies themselves ; and this is peculiarly a 
work unselfish and patriotic, and which Har- 
vard College ought to be most anxious to fos- 
ter and most prompt to recognize when done 
by her graduates. 

So it is with the Copyright Bill. Every 
reading man, every man interested in the 
growth of American literature, and finally, 
every man who cares for the honor of the 
American name and is keenly anxious that no 
reproach shall be rightly cast upon it, must 
rejoice that we have the present Copyright 
Law. It was won in the teeth of a violent and 
ignorant opposition, and in spite of the fact 
that many who had been supposed to be its 
friends turned against it at the last moment, 

94 



HARVARD MEN IN POLITICS 

on the shallow pretense that it did not go as 
far as they desired. It certainly should be a 
matter of congratulation for Harvard that her 
representatives were among the leaders in the 
fight on its behajf. 

In the copyright struggle, as in all other 
Congressional contests, there were many dif- 
ferent kinds of difficulties to be encountered, 
In the first place there was undoubtedly a ker- 
nel of dishonest opposition to the bill, due to 
the presence of an active lobby, subsidized by 
certain third-rate newspaper and book con- 
cerns. In the next place, there was a mass of 
inert indifference to be overcome. Thirdly, 
the friends of the bill had to meet the bitter 
opposition of perfectly honest and very able, 
though, as we believe, entirely misguided, 
opponents of the measure, — men like Roger 
Q. Mills, for instance, whose character and 
capacity rightly gave them great weight in 
Congress. Finally, there was the need of guard- 
ing against the crankiness of certain friends 
of the measure, which actually threatened to 
defeat the whole bill merely because it con- 
tained some features to propitiate the prin- 
ters, — features which were absolutely essential 
to its passage, and which were entirely non- 
95 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

essential when viewed from the standpoint 
either of abstract right or of expediency. The 
Senate passed the bill in one form ; the House 
passed it in another, after having first rejected 
it in yet a third. Then in the very last hours 
of the session a most strenuous effort had to 
be made, after having persuaded the confer- 
ence committees of the two Houses to agree 
upon a common measure, to persuade the 
Houses themselves to pass the conference re- 
port. No one who was not himself present 
in the Capitol during these final, vital hours of 
the fight can appreciate the tact, resolution, 
energy, and downright hard work of the men 
who were prominent in passing the bill. This 
had to be done with absolute disinterestedness. 
No man did anything for the Copyright Bill 
from selfish motives. It was pressed by a 
body of men without political influence, and 
it was passed solely as a measure of justice, 
and from the highest motives. The men who 
were instrumental in passing it deserve to re- 
ceive the credit always attaching to effective 
and disinterested work for a worthy ideal. 

In no respect has our government done bet- 
ter work than in its scientific departments. 
The different government publications on 

96 



HARVARD MEN IN POLITICS 

scientific subjects rank very high, and it is 
through these that many of the most eminent 
American scientists have been able to render 
their most distinguished services. No work 
that has been done by us as a nation has been 
more creditably performed, and the scientific 
bureaux are pecularly worthy of being well 
sustained by both the Congressional and Ex- 
ecutive branches. The work they do, however, 
is of a kind which can apply only to the higher 
intellectual faculties, and both the demagogue 
and the honest ignorant man always select 
these bureaux as peculiarly vulnerable objects 
of attack. There is not any very widely ex- 
tended public interest in them; the newspapers 
devote but small space to them, and there are 
no districts where there are any bodies of 
voters whose interests are in any way bound 
up with theirs. In consequence, they must 
rely for support upon the wholly unselfish, and 
usually unappreciative, efforts of a number of 
men in both branches of Congress, who do rec- 
ognize the importance of the work that is be- 
ing done, and are willing to take great trouble 
that it may not be stopped. A Harvard gradu- 
ate who has been bred and trained to the 
knowledge of the usefulness of public scientific 

97 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

and artistic institutions can with difficulty re- 
alize the enormous number of people to whom 
such institutions, when supported by the pub- 
lic money, are objects of positive dislike. It 
would be a revelation to the readers of this 
paper if they would turn to the Congressional 
Record and read some of the speeches made 
against the Smithsonian and kindred institu- 
tions in the last session. These speeches were 
so effective, and the forces to whose feelings 
they gave utterance so powerful, that at one 
time it looked as though all our scientific work 
would have to be stopped. The calamity was 
averted only by the strenuous endeavor of sev- 
eral of the Congressional leaders, who took not 
only an active and intelligent but very reso- 
lute part on behalf of the menaced institutions. 
Among these men, I am happy to say, one or 
two of the most prominent were Harvard grad- 
uates. Yet I doubt if the mass of our graduates 
even understood that there had been a struggle, 
far less that they felt any particular gratitude 
towards the men who had staved off Congres- 
sional action which would have amounted to 
a national disgrace. 

So it is with the unending fight over Civil 
Service Reform, — a fight waged so equally 

98 



HARVARD MEN IN POLITICS 

against the active and interested opposition of 
the great army of political place-hunters and 
against the indifference of that numerous class 
which is incapable of high ideals or of sensitive- 
ness to any cause that does not at the moment 
appeal to their pockets. The best work for 
Civil Service Reform that has been done in 
Congress of recent years must be put to the 
credit of Harvard graduates; who at the time, 
be it remembered, were also taking prominent 
part in the conflicts waged over those ques- 
tions in which the whole public are interested, 
such as the tariff and the currency. 

These are but samples of the unrewarded 
and yet all important tasks which every Har- 
vard man who goes into public life will find 
ready to his hand, and if he is worthy of his 
college,— as those men whose names I have 
given above, and scores of others like them, 
most assuredly are, — he will not shrink from 
these tasks, but will rather choose them gladly, 
because of the very fact that most public men 
will be glad to leave them to him, and because 
by doing them he will render most honorable 
and useful service to the State and nation. 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT ) '8o. 

99 



PART IV 



COLLEGE EDITORIALS 



From the HARVARD ADVOCATE— 

October 17, 1879, by Theodore Roosievelt. 

The Fall Meeting of the Athletic Association 
is very near at hand, and from the present 
prospect it does not seem likely that any pre- 
vious records will be lowered. This does not 
arise from lack of encouragement from the 
Association, which certainly has done every- 
thing possible to induce men to train for the 
events, but from the indisposition prevalent 
among college men to do the hard work nec- 
essary. There is yet time remaining for men 
to get ready for this meeting, and we most 
warmly encourage them to do so and not let 
the fear of being beaten hinder any one from 
doing his best. 

The statement of the financial condition of 
the Association shows it very much in need 



100 



COLLEGE EDITORIALS 

of money, and we hope that all will do their 
part toward paying off this debt, and that all 
who have not done so will join the Associa- 
tion. 

In conection with our athletic meetings we 
call attention to a letter in this issue, the spirit 
of which we heartily approve; we could rec- 
ommend it to the consideration of the Athletic 
Association as a very excellent suggestion for 
making our sports in every way better. If 
Yale can be brought in, it seems likely that the 
increased competition would result in better 
training, the only thing needful to improve 
Harvard's records. 

To the Editors of the Harvard Advocate : 

In view of increasing the interest in our 
athletic meetings a plan is suggested which 
would seem to bring about many results. 

At present we have two field meetings dur- 
ing the year, one in the fall and the other in 
the spring, a good track, and every inducement, 
it would seem, for men to try to win prizes; 
but the great difficulty has always been to get 
enough men to train for the different events to 
make them interesting, either on account of 
closeness in the result, or by reason of the es- 

101 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

pecially good records made. Very seldom do 
we have the pleasure of seeing either of these 
results. 

Now, what induces men to train so well and 
faithfully for the Football Team, Crew, or Base- 
ball Nine? Simply the desire to beat Yale. 
Would not they train equally well for our ath- 
letic sports if they were to try against Yale 
there too? It seems probable that the mere 
desire to win from Yale is all that is now 
needed to make our athletic meetings a com- 
plete success. 

The plan proposed is for one college to send 
a team to compete in the sports of the other. 
For example : Let Harvard send ten men to 
Yale in the fall, and Yale send ten men there in 
the spring. 

It seems clearly that this would be just the 
impetus which would make our sports what 
they should be. The number of spectators 
would be much greater, many men would train 
for the events, better time would be made, and 
our athletic sports would take their place with 
football and baseball ; and more important than 
all, we should not see our events filled by men 
who had no previous training, and only entered 
to "fill up." R. 

103 



COLLEGE EDITORIALS 
FOOTBALL AT OTHER COLLEGES. 

The football season has now fairly opened, 
and it is well to take a glance at what our rivals 
are doing. Yale has lost Thompson, who has 
twice turned the scales against us; but other- 
wise her team will probably be much the same 
as last year's, and there is plenty of good 
material from which to fill the vacancies. 
Captain Camp has already begun to put his 
men into regular training, running them in 
the gymnasium. Thirty men have been pledged 
to play against the team every afternoon, and 
games will probably be played with both Am- 
herst and Trinity; so that there will be no 
danger of her men suffering from lack of prac- 
tice. At present it hardly seems as if the team 
would be as good as last year's, but their play- 
ing is improving every day, and nothing but 
very hard work will enable our men to win 
the victory. 

Princeton will undoubtedly have a good, 
team, although the lower classes do not seem 
to possess very good material from which to 
choose; but it must be remembered that in 
Princeton, where there is no crew, all the best 
men go out on the football field, and work with 
103; 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

a faithfulness not very common at Harvard. 
At Cornell there has been some talk of or- 
ganizing a team, but it is doubtful if it can be 
done this year. What Columbia will do, it is 
difficult to say. On the whole .the prospect 
should be by no means discouraging to us. 
We certainly have good teams to fight against 
us; but there is plenty of excellent material 
in College, and our captain deserves most 
hearty praise, whatever be the result, for the 
pains he has taken, not only in keeping the 
men at work on the field, but in running them 
on the track every afternoon. What is most 
necessary is, that every man should realize 
the necessity of faithful and honest work, every 
afternoon, .Last year we had good individual 
players but they did not work together nearly 
as well as the Princeton team, and were not in 
as good condition as the Yale men. The foot- 
ball season is short ; and while it does last, the 
men ought to work faithfully, if they expect 
to win back for Harvard the position she held 
three years ago. 

R. 



T04 



APPENDIX 



ROOSEVELT'S 
COLLEGE COURSES 



FRESHMAN YEAR. 
(Courses all prescribed) 



Classical Literature — Twenty lectures. One 
a week. Assistant Professor Everett. 

Greek — Lysias (select orations) ; Plato (Apol- 
ogy and Crito) ; Euripedes (one play) ; 
Homer (Odyssey, Books V, VI, VII, 
IX, and XI); Goodwin's Greek Moods 
and Tenses ; Unprepared translation and 
composition; Selections from Grote's 
History of Greece, to illustrate the 
authors read. Three times a week. 
Messrs. J. W. White and Croswell. 

Latin — Livy (Books XXI, XXII); Horace 
(Odes and Epodes) ; Cicero; Merivale's 
General History of Rome (chaps. XLII- 
LIII; extemporaneous translations and 
composition. Three times a week. As- 
sistant Professors Everett and Smith 
and Mr. Gould. 
German — Peissner's Grammar; Joynes's Ot- 

107 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

to's Reader; German stories. Three 
times a week. Messrs. Faulhaber and 
Emerton. 

Mathematics — (advanced sections) Solid Ge- 
ometry (Chauvenet) ; Plane Trigonome- 
try (Chauvenet) ; Analytic Geometry 
(Peck). Three times a week in the 
first half-year and after May i, twice a 
week in second half-year till May i. 
Assistant Professor Byerly and Mr. 
Briggs. Algebra (Todhunter). Once a 
week from the beginning of the second 
half-year till May i. Assistant Profes- 
sor C. J. White. 

Physics — Chamber's Matter and Motion ; 
Goodeve's Mechanics (selections). 
Twice a week. Mr. Wilson. 

Chemistry — Elementary Chemistry (24 lec- 
tures.) Once a week. Professor Cooke. 

SOPHOMORE YEAR. 
Prescribed Courses. 

Rhetoric — Hill's Principles of Rhetoric and 
Punctuation; Abbott's How to Write 
Clearly. Twice a week. Professor A. S. 

108 



APPENDIX 

Hill and Mr. Ware. Six themes. Mr. 
Perry. 
History — Freeman's Outlines of General His- 
tory (to p. 272) ; Flander's Exposition 
of the Constitution of the United States ; 
Ewald's The Crown and its Advisers. 
Twice a week. Mr. Macvane. 

Elective Courses. 

German IV — Scientific Prose. Twice a week. 
Mr. Hodges. 

German V — Composition and Oral Exercises, 
Once a week. Assistant Professor Bart- 
lett. 

French IV — Litterature francaise au XVII 
erne siecle. Themes. Three times a 
week. Assistant Professor Jacquinot. 

Natural History III — Comparative Anatomy 
and Physiology of Vertebrates. Three 
times a week. Assistant Professor James. 

Natural History VIII — Elementary Botany. 
Gray's Structural and Systematic Bot- 
any. Three times a week. Assistant 
Professor Goodale. 



109 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

JUNIOR YEAR. 
Prescribed Courses. 

English — Six Themes. Professor Hill and 
Messrs. Ware and Perry. Four Forensic 
Themes. Assistant Professor Palmer. 

Philosophy — Jevon's Logic. Twice a week 
for a half year. Professor Peabody. 
Metaphysics; Ferrier's Lectures on the 
Greek Philosophy. Twice a week for 
a half year. Assistant Professor Pal- 
mer. 

Elective Courses. 

German VIII — Richter; Goethe (Faust and 
Aus meinem Leben) ; German lyrics; 
Composition. Three times a week. 
Professor Hedge. 

Italian I — G. Gozzi (L'Osservatore) ; Silvio 
Pellico (Le Mie Prigoni) ; Toscani's 
Grammar; Prose Composition. Three 
times a week. Mr. Bendelari. 

Philosophy VI — Political Economy ; J. S. 
Mill's Political Economy ; Financial Leg- 
islation of the United States. Three 
times a week. Professor Dunbar and 
Dr. Laughlin. 

no 



APPENDIX 

Natural History I — Physical Geography, Het- 
erology, and Structural Geology. Twice 
a week. Mr. Davis. 

Natural History III — Zoology (elementary 
course). Three times a week. Dr. 
Mark. 

SENIOR YEAR. 

Prescribed Course. 

English — Four Forensic Themes. Professor 
Peabody. 

Elective Courses. 

Italian II — A. Manzoni (I Promessi Sposi) ; 
Modern Plays ; Alfieri ; Torquato Tasso ; 
Syntax and Prose Composition. Three 
times a week. Assistant Professor Nash. 

Political Economy III — Cairnes's Leading 
Principles of Political Economy; Mc- 
Leod's Elements of Banking; Bastiat's 
Harmonies Economiques ; Lectures. 
Three times a week. Professor Dunbar. 

Natural History IV — Geology. Three times 
a week. Professor Shaler and Mr. Da- 
vis. 

Natural History VI — Advanced Zoology. 
Three times a week. Dr. Faxon. 

ill 



CLASS OF 1880 



Allen, Frederick Hobbs 
Allen, Russell Carpenter 
Alley, Wiliam Henry 
Almy, Frederic 
Andrews, William Shankland 
Atwood, Charles Edward 
Bacon, Robert 
Baldwin, Henry Cutler 
Barrows, Morton 
Barstow, Henry Taylor 
Bartlett, Nathaniel Cilley 
Beale, Charles Frederic Tiffany 
Bement, Gerard 
Benton, Charles Horace 
Billings, Sherard 
Bishop, Robert Roberts 
Bissell, Herbert Porter 
Blair, Charles Benton 
Blodgett, William Tilden ' ' 

112 



APPENDIX 

Bond, Hugh Lennox 

Brackett, Frank Herbert 

Bradford, Russell 

Bradley, Charles Wesley 

Breed, Amos Franklin 

Brigham, Clifford 

Brigham, Nat Maynard 

Brown, Louis Mayo 

Buckley, Philip Townsend 

Butler, George Minot 

Cabot, Francis Elliot, 

Carpenter, Frank Oliver 

Carruth, Ignatius Sumner 

Chapin, Henry Bainbridge 

Chapman, Charles Henry 

Chase, George Thorndike 

Clark, William Bradford 

Cole, Walter 

Collison, Harvey Newton 

Cook, William Hoff 

Davis, Charles Stevenson 

Doane, John 

Dodd, Edwin Merrick 

Dodge, Frank Faden 

Dwight, Jonathan 

Eaton, Arthur Wentworth Hamilton 

Edwards, Pierrepont 

113 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

Ellis, Ralph Nicholson 
Eustis, Herbert Hall 
Fessenden, James Deering 
Field, James Brainerd 
Fish, Charles Everett 
Foster, Charles Chauncey 
Fowler, Harold North 
French, Henry Gardner 
Fuller, Eugene 
Gardiner, Frederic 
Gaston, William Alexander 
Geddes, James 
Gest, Joseph Henry 
Gilbert, Samuel Cotton 
Gilley, Frank Milton 
Gilman, John Bradley 
Gooch, William Wallace 
Greeley, Louis May 
Griswold, George 
Guild, Henry Eliot 
Hale, Arthur 
Hall, Arthur Lawrence 
Hall, Frederic Bound 
Hall, William Dudley 
Hanscom, Arthur Lee 
Harrison, Mitchell 
Hart, Albert Bushnell 

n4 



APPENDIX 



Hatch, George Baptiste 
Hawes, Edward Southworth 
Henderson, Harold Gould 
Hibbard, George Abiah 
Hills, William Henry 
Hines, Fletcher Stephen 
Hobbs, Charles Austin 
Hooper, William 
Houston, John Wesley 
Howe, James Torrey 
Huidekoper, Frank Colhoon 
Hurst, Arthur 
Jackson, Henry 

Johnson, Laurence Henry Hitch 
Jones, Henry Champion 
Jordan, Frederick Dolbier 

Keene, Francis Bowler 

Kelly, George Reed 

Kenneson, Thaddeus Davis 

Kent, Percy 

Kilburn, Henry Whitman 

Lamson, John Lamson 

Lea, Arthur Henry 

Learned, William Pollock 

Lester, James Louis 

Lum, Edward Harris 

March, Charles Dudley 

"5 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

Merrill, George White 
Messervy, George Passarow 
Miller, Andrew 
Moors, Arthur Wendell 
Morgan, Charles 
Morrison, Sanford 
Morss, Charles Henry 
Mould, David 
Muzzey, Austin Kent 
Nickerson, Thomas White 
Norton, Charles Phelps 
O'Callaghan, William Francis 
O'KeefeJohn Aloysius 
Opdycke Leonard Eckstein 
Parker, Charles Albert 
Pellew, Wiliam George 
Pennypacker, James Lane 
Perry, Arthur 
Perry, George Murdock 
Perry, Herbert Mills 
Peters, George Gorham 
Pew, William Andrews 
Pilsbury, Ernest Henry 
Price, Wesley Frank 
Quincy, Josiah 
Rand, Harry Seaton 
Ranlett, Frederick Jordan 

116 



APPENDIX 



Rhett, Walter Horton 
Richardson, William King 
Rollins, Frank Blair 
Roosevelt, Theodore 
Russell, Eugene Dexter 
Saltonstall, Richard Middlecott 
Sanger, Chester Franklin 
Savage, Henry Wilson 
Sharon, Frederick William 
Sharp, William Beverly 
Shaw, Henry Russell 
Skinner, Samuel Wiggins 
Smith, Frederick Mears 
Smith, Walter Allen 
Stevens, William Stanford 
Stow, Vanderlynn 
Suire, Frank Overton 
Talbott, William Houston 
Taylor, Arthur 
Taylor, William George 
Tebbets, John Sever 
Thomsen, John Jacob 
Tiffany, Walter Checkley 
Townsend, Howard 
Trimble, Richard 
Tupper, Frederic Allison 
Turpin, Bradford Strong 

117 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

Wakefield, John Lathrop 
Ware, Charles 
Warreti, Charles Everett 
Washburn, Charles Grenfill 
Webb, Henry Randall 
Weimer, Albert Barnes 
Weld, Christopher Minot 
Welling, Richard Ward Greene 
Wheelan, Fairfax Henry 
Whitcomb, Silas Merrick 
White, Franklin Davis 
White, William Howard 
Whiting, Frederick Erwin 
Wilkinson, Alfred 
Williams, Otto Holland 
Winlock, William Crawford 
Winsor, Robert 
Woodbury, John 



118 



AUG 15 1910 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 



MJ8 15 



